SIR WALTER 
RALEIGH 




Class __11M^ 
Book 



Conyright}!?. 






COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 




"the meeting of sir JOHN GILBERT AND RALEIGH "— Pagrg 69 



SIR 

WALTER RALEIGH 



BY 



BEATRICE MARSHALL 



With Frontispiece in Color and Eight 
Black- and- White Illustrations 




NEW YORK 

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 






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Copyright, 1914, by 
Frederick A. Stokes Company 



All Rights Reserved 



i l/^ August, 1914 



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JUL 23 198'="""" 



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Contents 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Boyhood ........ 7 

II. At Sea and in Ireland .12 

III. Favourite of the Queen 18 

IV. Lord Warden of the Stannaries .... 23 
V. Newfoundland and Virginia ..... 28 

VI. The Scattering of the Armada and the Expedition 

TO Lisbon ........ 39 

VII. Raleigh and Spenser ...... 46 

VIII. The 'Revenge,' and Raleigh's Marriage . . bb 

IX. The 'Madre de Dios' 63 

X. Sherborne and Guiana 69 

IX. The Sacking of Cadiz 80 

XII. The Island Voyage 87 

XIII. Fall of Essex 94 

XIV. Queen Elizabeth's Last Days .... 101 
XV. Plots and Conspiracies 108 

XVI. Raleigh's Trial at Winchester, 1603 . . .114 

XVII. The Reprieve 121 

XVIII. The Eagle in his Cage 128 

XIX. 'The History of the World' 135 

3 



/ 



Contents 



CHAPTER PAGE 

XX. Raleigh Released ...... 142 

XXI. Guiana Again 146 

XXII. A Chapter of Disasters. ..... 155 

XXIII. Gondomar's Letters ...... 163 

XXIV. Raleigh defends himself in Letters to Lord 

Carew 170 

XXV. Betrayal 176 

XXVI. The End 181 



Illustrations 



The Meeting of Sir John Gilbert and Raleigh Frontispiece > 

PAGE 

Raleigh casting his new Cloak of Plush and Ermine across 

THE MUDDY StREET . . . . . • .20 

Raleigh presiding over the Stannaries Parliament of 

Devon and Cornwall . . . . . . .24 

Raleigh riding with the Queen at Tilbury Camp . .42 

The Battle between the Spanish Fleet and the 'Revenge' 58 
Breast-high in the Surf he led the Attack . . . 90 ' 

Raleigh's Coach stormed by the Mob . . . . 114 «--- 

He was carried ashore in his Litter . . . . 156 ^ 

He saluted Captain King AS he WAS entering the Boat . 178- 



One of the gallantest worthies that ever England bred 

AUBRET 

God has made nobler heroes, but He never made a finer 
gentleman than Sir Walter Raleigh R. L. Stevenson 



CHAPTER I: Boyhood 

THERE never was a time when so many 
great men lived in England as in the 
* spacious times' of Queen Elizabeth. 
Our hearts thrill with pride when we read about 
those gallant men: those soldiers, seame.n, and 
merchant-adventurers, great poets, play-writers, 
and scholars, of whom Shakespeare was the greatest 
of all. 

It must have been a glorious time to live in, we 
think, that time when there were new worlds to 
discover, and when nearly every crew that set sail in 
their ships from British harbours went on a voyage 
of discovery, and reached unknown countries over- 
seas and saw strange beasts and found wonderful 
treasures — gold nuggets, pearls and coral — which 
the sailors brought home with them to their humble 
native fishing villages. 

Near one of these little villages on the red coast 
of Devon there stood (and it stands to-day) a pleas- 
ant farm-house with thatched gabled roof, and 
latticed diamond-paned windows on either side of a 
carved stone porch. A long sunny garden path, 
flagged with white stones and flanked with sun- 
flowers, hollyhocks and tall white lilies, leads up to 
the oaken door with its big iron nails and massive 
knocker. 

This house is Hayes Farm, near Budleigh-Salter- 
ton, famous as the birthplace of One of the most pic- 
turesque heroes of the EHzabethan period — Walter 
Raleigh, who was born there in the wainscotted 
chamber above the porch. The year of his birth is 

7 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

not certain, but 1552 is generally accepted as the 
most probable date. 

It was a small house for so large a family, for 
Raleigh's father, another Walter, had been married 
three times. His first wife, Joan Drake (a cousin 
of the great admiral), gave him two sons, John and 
George; his second wife, a daughter, Mary; and 
lastly, Katharine, widow of Sir Otho Gilbert of 
Compton Castle and mother of the brave explorer. 
Sir Humphrey Gilbert, brought him four sons, of 
whom Walter was the second, his brother Carew 
being two years older. 

Love of the sea and everything belonging to it 
was born in his blood. His kinsmen were the 
Champernouns, Gilberts, Grenvilles and Carews, 
sea-faring names that will never die. His Cham- 
pernoun cousins were, most of them, hardy sea- 
rovers, gentlemen of noble descent, who sailed 
their own ships, and searched for the North-west 
passage to Cathay, plundered Spanish galleons, 
and carried off cargoes of treasure and negroes. 

Let us picture the young Raleigh, as an artist of 
our own day has painted him for us, a slender, long- 
legged boy in doublet and hose, with a small ruff 
tightly encircling the pointed oval of his dark hand- 
some face. We see this boy riding to the Grammar 
School in a neighbouring town, through the fresh- 
ness of the morning and between the high-banked 
Devonshire lanes, with a servant behind him 
carrying his books; we see him coming home in 
the afternoon and, after a hearty meal of spiced 
beer and slices from a crusty home-baked coun- 
try loaf, spread with honey and clotted cream, 

8 



Boyhood 

running off again as fast as his long legs would 
carry him, through Budleigh village, past the 
noble old parish church where he worshipped 
on Sundays, over lush, marshy meadows, never 
stopping till he came to the shelving white beach of 
Salterton and his first love, the blue, wide sea. What 
joy it was to sit on the beach among the lobster 
pots with his pointed chin resting on his knees, while 
the sailors mended their nets and talked of those far- 
away lands across the Atlantic and of the marvels 
that they had seen there. How eagerly the boy 
drank in tales of adventures by sea; of fights with 
the Spaniards and the capture of booty; of landing 
on foreign shores and making tracks through pathless 
virgin forests; of Red Indians and birds of gorgeous 
plumage, and of fierce Amazon women. Of these 
things were the stories related on Salterton beach by 
the sailors, who wore their hair in ringlets and in 
their ears gold earrings shaped hke ships, and whose 
skin had been so scorched and withered by tropical 
suns that they were nearly as swarthy as the Indians 
themselves. 

Like all boys in those days, Walter longed to go to 
sea, and Sir Francis Drake was his hero. But his 
ambitions were as numerous as his talents, and it 
was not on the sea that he began his career but at 
Oxford. 

He was entered as a Commoner at Oriel College, 
Oxford, at the age of fourteen, and laid the founda- 
tion of that great love of learning which in his 
later life, during long years of imprisonment in the 
Tower, was to be his solace and distraction. 

*His natural parts being strangely advanced by 



Sir JVaher Raleigh 

academical learning under the care of an excellent 
tutor he became the ornament of the juniors and 
was worthily esteemed a proficient in oratory and 
philosophy,' says Anthony Wood in his AthencB 
Oxonienses, As he was son of a poor country squire 
and one of numerous brothers, Raleigh was far from 
affluent in his college days. Another gossip, Aubrey, 
relates a story 'that in his youth he was under straits 
for want of money. Mr. Child, of Worcestershire, 
told me that Sir Walter borrowed a gown of him 
when he was at Oxford (they were of the same 
college) which he never restored, nor money for it.' 

It is interesting to know that it was at Oxford 
that Raleigh first became acquainted with Philip 
Sidney, the mirror of all chivalry, who afterward, 
like himself, was to be a favourite of the Queen and 
a shining light of the court. 

He was still only a boy of seventeen when he left 
Oxford without taking a degree and went to the 
religious wars in France. He joined the forces 
of the Huguenots, and received his baptism of fire 
at the battle of Jarnac (which he mentions in his 
great History of the World), where Conde was slain. 
Very little is known of Raleigh's French Campaign 
except that it must have lasted ^ve or six years, 
a period long enough in which to acquire the art of 
warfare, and to become callous to its horrors and 
bloodshed. What scenes of pillage and violence 
this boy-soldier must have seen during his sojourn 
in the Huguenot camp, and probably he was not 
behindhand in exploits of personal valour and 
daring, but in those days there were no dispatches 
to report the doings of the obscure younger son of 

10 



Boyhood 

a Devonshire country gentleman at the seat of war. 
We can only surmise that his military training in 
France was of the soundest, and made a man of him. 
He came back to England, at the age of twenty- 
three, in 1575, and entered as a student of the Middle 
Temple. He did not, however, read law, but be- 
came a gay youth, hanging about the court, for 
perhaps he was already ambitious of being a con- 
spicuous figure in it. On one occasion, after a brawl 
with his boon-companions, he found himself lodged 
for a week in the Fleet prison, and it is thought that 
at this time he may have been attached to the house- 
hold of the then prime favourite of the Queen, the 
Earl of Leicester, as were so many young men who 
hoped to gain a footing at court. 

Yet nothing is definitely known about this, and 
Raleigh only steps out in clear relief from the 
shadowy mists of the past when he starts on his 
first naval expedition under the command of his 
half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert. 



n 



CHAPTER II: At Sea, and 
in Ireland 

FORTUNE did not favour the first sea-faring 
adventure in which Raleigh was concerned, 
though its commander, Gilbert, had a high 
reputation both by land and sea. It was the first 
crude idea of laying the foundations of an Empire 
beyond the ocean, for this time it was not a 
question of plunder only, but lands were to be 
seized in the Queen's name — lands on which it 
was designed to plant colonies. 

Gilbert's patent authorized him to take possession 
*of any barbarous and heathen lands not possessed 
by any Christian prince or people,' and the country 
he had in view was 'that Northern part of America 
inhabited by a savage people of mild and tractable 
disposition, and of all other unfrequented places the 
one most fitted and most commodious for us to inter- 
meddle withal.' Gilbert, together with his cousin. Sir 
Richard Grenville, and others, petitioned her Majesty 
*To allow of an enterprise by them conceived; and 
with the help of God under the protection of her 
Majesty's most princely name and goodness, at their 
own charge and adventure, to be performed for dis- 
covery of sundry rich and unknown lands, fatally 
and it seemeth by God's providence reserved for 
England and for the honour of her Majesty.' 

In September, 1578, Sir Humphrey Gilbert had 
gathered together in Dartmouth harbour eleven 
vessels * furnished with five hundred choice soldiers 
and sailors.' Of one of these vessels *The Falcon,' 
Raleigh was captain. Contrary winds delayed the 

\i 



At Sea and in Ireland 

sailing of the expedition for a few days, and in the 
Bay of Biscay, Knollys, a relation of the Queen's, 
who was. a member of the party, quarrelled with 
Gilbert and deserted with all his crew. The next 
misfortune was the loss of a ship in a brush with 
the Spaniards, when Raleigh narrowly escaped being 
killed. After this all the ships were driven by 'foul 
seas ' back to Plymouth, and thus the affair ended and 
the first dreams of founding a colony melted away. 

Nothing more is heard of Raleigh till the summer 
of 1580, when he received a commission as a Captain 
of the Queen, to raise a hundred foot soldiers to fight 
against the Irish rebel, Desmond, in the civil wars in 
Ireland. He landed at Cork after a stormy voyage, 
not very pleased with the business before him, as his 
pay was only four shillings a day without 'food and 
raiment.' 

He determined from the first to show the Irish no 
mercy, and his brutality toward them belongs to 
the darkest chapter of Raleigh's history. In those 
days the Irish were in a perpetual state of rebellion 
against their English conquerors, who had planted 
themselves among them, taking possession of their 
fertile lands and trying to force on them at the point 
of the sword the Protestant religion. 

Lord Grey, under whom Raleigh served in Ireland, 
ruled with an iron hand, though his secretary, 
the poet, Edmund Spenser, author of the Faerie 
Queene^ described him as 'gentle, affable, loving 
and temperate.' Under this Lord Deputy's regime 
in the unhappy country, according to his own 
account no less than '1485 chief men and gentle- 
men were slain, not accounting those of meaner 

13 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

sort, nor yet executions by law and killing of 
churles, which were innumerable.' 

Among the *chief men and gentlemen' were the 
brave and noble Desmonds, Fitzgeralds, and Gerald- 
ines, whose only crime was a passionate love of their 
own fair green island, and attachment to their relig- 
ion which had been the faith of their fathers ever 
since the good St Patrick had landed on Irish shores. 

Lord Grey, an upright, high-principled gentleman 
in private life, was a bigoted Puritan, and when the 
Queen sent him to govern the Irish he was so blinded 
by religious prejudice that no treatment seemed to 
him too harsh and cruel for the unfortunate rebels. 
No wonder then that the Lord Deputy and his 
underlings talked of them as *these Irish rogues . . . 
worse than dogs,' and declared that there was no 
way 'to daunt these people but by the edge of the 
sword and to plant better in their place, or rather 
to let them cut each other's throats.' 

Just at the time that Raleigh arrived in Ireland, 
there were high hopes among the Irish rebels of 
throwing off the detested yoke, because the Pope and 
King Philip of Spain had sent over Italian and 
Spanish soldiers to help them . They had established 
a garrison in a fortress at Smerwick, while another 
detachment took up a position in Fort Del Ore, and 
it was an hour of grave anxiety for Lord Grey, as Des- 
mond with a large army was marching to their relief. 

It was against this band of combined foreign and 
native forces that Raleigh's regiment was to be 
engaged. His first public act in the distressful 
country was to take part in the trial of Sir James 
Fitzgerald, brother of the rebel leader, the Earl of 

14 



^t Sea and in Ireland 

Desmond. No mercy was shown the unfortunate 
Fitzgerald and he was condemned to the horrible 
death of being drawn and quartered. A httle later 
Raleigh distinguished himself in the field by taking 
prisoner or slaughtering a whole detachment of 
the enemy. It is related that among the prisoners 
a man was taken covered with bundles of withies. 
When Raleigh asked him what he had intended 
domg with these, he replied that he would have used 
them as halters for the 'English Churles," where- 
upon Raleigh said that the withies should now 
serve to hang an 'Irish Kern,' and at once suited 
the action to the word. 

Such incidents were a fitting prelude to the bloody 
massacre of Fort Del Ore, which took place under 
the personal generalship of Earl Grey, and was thus 
described in his own words in a dispatch to the 
Queen: 'I sent certain gentlemen in to see their 
weapons and armour laid down' (the garrison had 
surrendered after a parley) 'and to guard the 
munitions and victual there left for spoil. Then put 
I in certain bands who straight fell to execution 
There were six hundred slain, four hundred were as 
gallant and goodly personages as of any I ever 
beheld. So hath it pleased the Lord of hosts to 
deliver your enemies into your Highness' hand.' 
And m this infamous butchery of defenceless men 
who had laid down their arms on the understanding 
that their lives would be spared, Raleigh, to his 
shame, played an active part. 

'Captain Raleigh,' says the chronicler, 'together 
with Captain Mackworth entered into the Castle 
and made a great slaughter.' 

15 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

The Queen was not pleased with the massacre and 
the course of events in Ireland, and Lord Grey 
was eventually recalled, through the influence of 
Leicester, his enemy at court. 

Raleigh remained in Ireland for thirteen months 
longer, his sword never idle, for the insurrection still 
smouldered on. During the winter of 1580 he was 
quartered at Cork. He rode from there one day to 
Dublin to prevail upon Lord Grey to. let him capture 
and carry off 'Lord Barry of Barry more,' whose loy- 
alty was under suspicion. He obtained leave, but 
the country was swarming with spies, and Barry was 
informed of Raleigh's plan, and, to anticipate it, 
burnt his own castle and laid waste his estates. 
Then Fitz-Edmond, an adherent of Desmond's lay 
in ambush at the ford between Youghal and Cork, 
which Captain Raleigh had to cross on his way home. 

With only six men as his escort, Raleigh found 
himself in a tight corner and confronted suddenly by 
a comparatively large force of cavalry and foot 
soldiers. Almost single-handed he cut his way 
through with a young Devonshire companion, whose 
life he twice saved, as his horse foundered in deep 
water crossing the river, while Raleigh, on the oppo- 
site bank, stood at bay with a pistol in one hand and 
a quarter staff in the other till the rest of his escort 
had crossed too. 

Another daring feat was bearding Lord Roche in 
his own castle and carrying him off a prisoner to 
Cork through a country that bristled with rebels. 
On the way he evaded another ambush of eight 
hundred men under Fitz-Edmond, with consum- 
mate strategy, and had many other hair-breadth 

16 



A I Sea and in Ireland 

escapes. He was not at all modest about these 
brilliant performances, and never tired of bringing 
them to the notice of his superiors and claiming 
recognition of his services. He complained of his 
position, and wanted more forces to stamp out the 
rebellion. To neither of his leaders Lord Grey, nor 
Ormonde, the military governor of Munster, with 
whom he was brought into closer contact, was 
Raleigh loyal. He criticized them both in his letters 
and blamed them for the dragging on of the war. 

'Considering that this man,' he wrote of Ormonde, 
*has now been Lord General of Munster about two 
years, there are at this instant a thousand traitors 
more than there were the first day. Would God 
the service of Sir Humphrey Gilbert might be rightly 
valued, who with a third part of the garrison now in 
Ireland, ended a rebellion not much inferior to this 
in three months.' 

By the end of 1581 the rebellion in Munster had 
been at last crushed. John of Desmond was hanged 
at Cork and his head sent to be displayed in 
London, the Earl, his brother, a fugitive, was 
hunted from one end of the country to the other, 
and the poor 'Kerns,' as the common Irish were 
called, cowed and terrified, showed no more fight 
for twenty years to come. The English garrisons 
were reduced, and Raleigh's Irish enterprise ended. 
Briefly as it has been outlined here, one would 
rather have dropped a veil over it altogether, if it 
had been permissible to do so, for in spite of the dis- 
tinguished deeds of bravery that marked it, the 
episode belongs, as has been said before, to the least 
creditable of our hero's long career. 

17 



CHAPTER III: Favourite of 
the Queen 

RALEIGH left the wild and blood-stained 
Sister Isle and carried with him dispatches 
to lay before his Queen in Her Majesty's 
Council Chamber. Here she listened with keen 
interest to the debates between him and his former 
chief, Lord Grey, on the recent unhappy events in 
Ireland, and took special notice of his suggestions 
for its future management. 

There can be no doubt that the young Captain's 
sharp retorts and rapier-thrusts in argument with 
Grey appealed to the Queen, and took her fancy 
as much as his strikingly handsome appearance. 

At this time Raleigh was in the prime of his man- 
hood. He was thirty years old, six feet in height, 
with an imposing and magnificent bearing. His 
short beard curled up at the end and matched the 
brown of his bold eyes. He spoke with a broad 
Devonshire accent, which added to the fascination 
of his fluent, persuasive speech. 

His one *naeve' (fault), says old Aubrey in his 
vivid portraits of great men, 'was that he was 
damnably proud.' It may have been this swaggering 
pride which made him countless enemies, for Raleigh 
took no pains to become popular among his rival 
courtiers except when it served his purpose. Heart- 
ily as he was hated he was sometimes fawned upon. 

*John Long being one time in the Privy Garden 
with his master, saw the Earl of Nottingham wipe the 
dust from Sir W. Raleigh's shoes in compliment.'^ 

1 Lives of Eminent Men, by John Aubrey. 
18 



Favourite of the Queen 

But this humble act was probably meant as a com- 
pliment to the value of the shoes rather than to 
Raleigh himself, as he often carried gems worth 
hundreds of pounds on his feet. Even at Elizabeth's 
gorgeous court no one rivalled him in splendour 
of costume. 

He wore white satin doublets embroidered with 
*rich pearles and a mighty rich chain of great 
pearles about his neck.' Every child knows and 
loves the pretty story of his casting his new cloak of 
plush and ermine across the muddy street so that his 
Queen should not wet her dainty feet by stepping 
in a puddle. There is no reason why the story should 
not be true, though it comes down to us on the 
authority of only one chronicler, gossiping Bishop 
Fuller.^ Such an act of spontaneous chivalry would 
come naturally to Raleigh, who had not associated for 
six years with French gallants without acquiring some 
of their graces and elegance. The custom of spread- 
ing the cloak was not unusual abroad, especially 
among the Spaniards who, in spite of their cruelty 
and bigotry, excelled among nations in courtesy. 

Quite as likely is the other story that has been dis- 
credited as legendary, the story of Raleigh scratching 
on a window-pane at Greenwich where he knew the 
Queen would come by and see the words: 

'Fain would I climb but that I fear to fall.* 

2 Her Majesty, taking the air in a walk, stopped at a plashy place, 
in doubt whether to go on, when Raleigh, dressed in a gay and genteel 
habit of those times, immediately cast off and spread his new plush 
cloak on the ground; on which her Majesty, gently treading, was 
conducted over clean and dry. — Fuller s Lives. 

19 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

To which she responded: 

*If thy heart fail thee do not climb at all.* 

Certain it is that Raleigh's heart did not fail him 
and that, with the encouragement of his royal mis- 
tress, he swung himself fearlessly upwards and soared 
from one success to another till he reached the high- 
est pinnacle of fame. 

The first substantial favour he enjoyed was a 
grant of £100 for his services in Ireland and an 
appointment to a command there, which he was of 
course excused from attending in person, for his 
presence at court was essential to his role as new 
favourite. The old favourites, Dudley, Earl of 
Leicester ('Sweet Robin'), Sir Thomas Heneage, 
and Sir Christopher Hatton (* Bel-wether'), who 
danced so beautifully that he was called the dancing 
Chancellor, pretended to be greatly chagrined by 
their noses being put out of joint by this upstart, 
* Water.' 

Queen Elizabeth's long-drawn-out flirtation with 
the hideous Duke of Angou (whom, strange to say, she 
had been nearer wedding than any of her good-look- 
ing suitors) had just come to an end. Leicester's 
secret marriage, when the news of it had leaked out 
a year before, had been counted a deadly crime, 
and the Earl no longer basked in the sunshine of her 
regal smiles. But with the unmarried Hatton the 
Queen still coquetted and played off ridiculous 
airs. She tried to pacify her *belwether's' jealousy 
of Raleigh by assurances that she would suffer no 
element (meaning 'Water') to so abound as to breed 
confusion.' And on one occasion, when Raleigh 

20 




'RALEIGH CASTING HIS NEW CLOAK OF PLUSH AND 
ERMINE ACROSS THE MUDDY STREET" — Page 19 



Favourite of the Queen 

took possession of Hatton's lodgings at Croydon, 
the Queen flew into a rage and used 'bitterness of 
speech against "Water" saying that she would 
rather see him hanged than equal him with Hatton 
or that the world should think she did so/ 

When Angou left England and sailed for Flushing, 
where he was to receive the fealty of the Nether- 
lands, he was escorted to his new dominions by 
Leicester, Sidney and Raleigh among others. On 
taking leave of William the Silent, Raleigh was 
again entrusted with dispatches, which he carried to 
the Queen with the message: ^uh umbra alarum 
tuerum protegimur. 

But with the exception of such an occasional 
absence as this, Raleigh spent the years preceding 
the great national triumph of defeating the Armada 
mainly in dancing attendance on his sovereign. 
His star continued in the ascendant. Riches and 
honours were heaped on him. He was created 
Captain of the Guard, and given as his town resi- 
dence Durham House in the Strand, one of those 
noble palaces with gardens running down to the 
river, which made Elizabethan London so fair a city. 
'I well remember his study,' says Aubrey, 'which 
was on a little turret that looked into and over the 
Thames and had the prospect which is perhaps as 
pleasant as any in the world.' He kept a retinue 
of forty persons and as many horses, and entertained 
on a magnificent scale all sorts and conditions of 
men. His wealth was derived from leases of prop- 
erty belonging to All Souls College, Oxford, from 
patents to license vintners, and many other emolu- 
ments which the Queen lavished on him. 

21 



Sir JFa/ter Raleigh 

In Ireland he ^ot the lion's share of the confiscated 
Desmond estates when they were divided up and 
scrambled for. The country had been so devastated 
by the sword durinj^' the late civil war that it was 
possible to travel from one end of Munster to the 
other * without meeting man, woman or child save 
in the towns.* Raleigh was given the third of seign- 
ories in Cork, Waterford and Tipj>erary, amount- 
ing to 12,000 acres each, of fertile wooded land. 
He rented Lismore Castle at a nominal rate, and had, 
as well, a fine manor house on the coast at Youghal. 
To do him justice he made every effort to cultivate 
and render productive the soil which so recently he 
had helped to drench with blood. lie induced 
young farmers and yeoman to come over from 
Devon and Cornwall and introduce agricultural 
improvements into the isle of sighs and tears, where 
later he planted the first potatoes in his garden at 
Youghal. The Devonians were told that there were 
pearls and even diamonds to be found in Ireland 
that rivalled those of the Indes, and so the sons of 
squires and farmers between the Axe and Exe, and 
Dart and Tavy found their way across the Irish 
Channel. 

Raleigh pictured the scenes of desolation trans- 
formed into acres of waving corn and rye, with 
hundreds of smiling homesteads and farms, like those 
of his dear native county of Devon. A flourishing 
colony was to aris(» like a Pluenix from the ashes, but 
somehow it did not, and Raleigh's vast Irish estates 
caused him more vexation and disappointment than 
they ever brought him satisfaction and pleasure. 



CHAPTER IV: Lord Warden 
of the Stannaries 

IN 1585 Raleigh was made Lord Warden of the 
Stannaries, an important position, in which he 
was much more successful than as a landlord 
in Ireland. 

The Stannaries Parliament of Devon and Cornish 
miners was held in the open air on Dartmoor's purple 
heather, at the spot where the massive pile of Crockern 
Tor rises suddenly against the sky. In this solitary 
silence, which, as a rule, the very curlews seemed shy of 
breaking, the hardy stannators of the moorlands had 
gathered from Saxon times at the summons of their 
Warden to hold their conventions. Roughly hewn in 
the grey rock of the Tor were the Warden's chair, the 
seals for the jurors, the corner stone of the court crier, 
and a table on which to place parchments and a bottle 
of wine for the refreshment of the orators. 

Burgesses from Tavistock and Ashburton, and 
other towns in the west, crowds of rough and un- 
kempt tinners from the mines, mustered in great force 
to this curious meeting, especially when the great 
granite seat in the open air was occupied by the versa- 
tile knight, the accomplished scholar and soldier and 
well-beloved of his Queen, Walter Raleigh. His 
personality had a wonderful charm for the West 
Country folk, who were proud to claim him as their 
own, and with whom he was as popular as he was the 
reverse among his gay fellow-courtiers at Whitehall. 

Here, breathing his mild native air, he was in his 
element, administering the laws that he drew up for 
the tinners, settling their suits and redressing their 

23 



Sir JValter Raleigh 

grievances. One can picture him, sceptre in hand, 
assuming an air of almost solemn dignity as he threw 
himself heart and soul into the business, the splen- 
dour of his dazzling apparel hidden for the time 
being beneath his robe of office, which resembled the 
garb of the ancient Druids. 

And then when the people dispersed in all direc- 
tions, streaming to their homes over the purple moor, 
Raleigh would probably ride round, visiting old haunts 
and friends; he would see himself a boy again at every 
turn; here was the stream in which he had fished with 
his gallant half-brothers for trout, bubbling down one 
of the ferny green combes; here the cabin of some old 
fisherman perched like an eagle's nest on the red cliff s, 
where he had been shown nuggets of gold and lumps of 
coral, and heard tales of adventure and of ' Frankie ' 
Drake, which had first awakened his boyish dreams of 
sailing the seas in search of new worlds. 

Those dreams were never relinquished even when 
he had donned the silver armour of the Captain of the 
Guard and was bound hand and foot by his silken 
chains to the old world. In his palatial study at 
Durham House overlooking the Thames, he often 
spent the hours of night when he was released from 
his duties at court, with charts spread out before 
him, tracing, by the help of a Hariot or a Richard 
Hakluyt, those voyages for which he supplied the 
funds and fitted out ships for others to sail in, while 
he, at the behest of his Queen, had to stay at home. 

It must have been before his visits to Devon, 
to carry out his duties as Warden of the Stannaries, 
that Raleigh, the true Devonian, having neared the 
apex of his fortunes, was fired with Ihe desire to buy 

24 




'RALRIGII PRESIDING OVER THE STANNIRIFS PAHT T v 
MENT OF DEVON AND CORNWALL' -l^l^f ^PARLIA- 



Lord Tf^arden of the Stannaries 

back his modest birthplace, Hayes Farm, which had 
passed into other hands. Aubrey gives the follow- 
ing letter sent to 'Mr Duke in Devon, writt with his 
own hand': 

Mr Duke, 

I wrote to Mr Prideaux to move you for the 
purchase of Hayes a farme sometimes in my father's 
possession. I will most willingly give whatsoever 
in your conscience you shall deem it worth, and if 
at any time you shall have occasion to use me, you 
shall find me a thankful friend to you and yours. 
I am resolved if I cannot entreat you, to build at 
Colliton; but for the natural disposition I have to 
that place being borne in that house I had rather 
seat myself there than anywhere else; I take my 
leave readie to countervaile all your courtesies 
to the utter of my power. You very willing friend. 
In all I shall be able, Walter Raleigh 

Court, ye xxvi. of July 1584. 

The said'Mr Duke cherished this letter for posterity 
in some old carved oak bureau, with other papers, 
but remained 'unmoved' by Sir Walter's request to 
sell him Hayes Farm. That he should have coveted 
it so much, is proof of his love of Devon and its 
associations. If Raleigh had to be content with 
his portion as a younger son of Collaton-Raleigh, 
in Devonshire, in five other counties he came in for 
vast acres, on the execution of Anthony Babington, 
for high treason. The wealthy young Jesuit had 
been implicated in a plot to murder Elizabeth and 
put the Queen of Scots on the throne. This plot was 

25 



Sir IValter Raleigh 

unravelled by the astute Walsingham, the Queen's 
secretary, who played for the purpose a double game 
with Spain, in which duplicity Raleigh is supposed to 
have had some hand. Babington, anyhow, based 
all his hopes of a pardon on getting Raleigh to 
intercede for his life, offering him £1000 through a 
cousin, an insignificant sum indeed compared with 
the great accession of wealth which came to him with 
Babington's estates. The Queen granted Raleigh 
all Babington's goods and property, except one 
quaint clock, which she retained for herself. This 
marked the high tide of Raleigh's fortunes. Yet at 
the very moment when he had the ball at his feet, 
a cloud arose on his halcyon sky in the shape of a 
younger rival, a youth of twenty, gifted with a 
charm of manner and grace of person which proved 
of even more deadly fascinations than his own for 
the virgin Queen of over fifty. ' When she is abroad, 
nobody is near her, but my Lord of Essex; and at 
night my Lord is at cards, or one game or another 
with her till the birds sing in the morning.' 

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was stepson of 
the Queen's earlier favourite, Leicester, whose secret 
marriage with the boy's mother. Lady Essex, had 
incurred his royal mistress's dire displeasure. High- 
spirited, head-strong and insolent, the young gallant 
was not disposed to tolerate cheerfully the rivalry of 
the man whom he dubbed that * Knave Raleigh.' 

The Queen told Essex that there was 'no such 
reason why he should disdain him.' 

'This speech,' Essex said, 'troubled me so much 
that, as near as I could, I did describe unto her what 
he had been and what he was.' 

26 



Lord Tf^arden of the Stannaries 

One can easily understand how little the younger 
minion was able to appreciate the genius of the 
elder. What did Essex know or care about the great 
schemes of Empire-building which busied the brain 
behind that dome-like forehead? or of the big soul 
hampered in its 'flights of "poesie" by the silver 
breast-plate of the Captain of the Guard.' 

To him Raleigh was, as to others of his fellow- 
courtiers, merely the upstart * Water,' and the 
new-comer made it his business to try and oust him 
from favour, finding in his dislike of Raleigh an in- 
centive for his flirtation with the Queen, a flirtation 
which otherwise would have been distasteful to him; 
for at the age of ten this pretty boy had declined 
most emphatically to be kissed by Elizabeth. 

Yet Essex was not a rival to be despised. He too 
had gifts of mind as well as beauty of person, and 
might have attained to greatness had he been less 
impetuous and violent. Full of fiery spirits and 
dash, there was another side to his character, as his 
friendship with the great scholar and astute lawyer. 
Lord Bacon, testifies. 

A modern historian has said that Essex *must have 
seemed in the eyes of Bacon like the hope of the 
world.' 

Elizabeth made him Master of the Horse, and in 
this capacity friction with Raleigh was inevitable. 
We shall find that up to the time of Essex's tragic 
end, the life-paths of these two heroes often cross each 
other. But now we will turn for a time from Ral- 
eigh as a courtier to follow his doings as the founder 
of that flourishing Empire beyond the ocean, of which 
to-day every Englishman has reason to be proud. 

27 



CHAPTER V: Newfoundland 
and Virginia 

WE have seen that Raleigh's attempt, in 
conjunction with his half-brother, Sir 
Humphrey Gilbert, to begin an English 
settlement in North America in 1578 had failed. 
Gilbert, nevertheless, was determined to try again 
before his six years' patent elapsed, and was always 
on the look out for an opportunity. The opportunity 
came with Walter's rise at court. By the spring of 
1583 a fleet had been got together and was ready to 
sail under the command of Gilbert. Raleigh spent 
£2000 in building and equipping one of the ships 
called the 'Bark-Raleigh,' which must not be con- 
fused with the 'Ark-Raleigh,' an altogether different 
vessel which was built in 1557, and employed against 
the Armada. 

Raleigh was appointed vice-admiral of the ex- 
pedition, but the Queen refused to let him go, and also 
tried to persuade Gilbert to stay at home * as a man 
noted for no good hap at sea.' His brother's inter- 
vention, however, gained the Queen's consent, and 
she ordered Raleigh to send Sir Humphrey a token, 
which he did with the following letter: 

Brother, — I have sent you a token from her 
Majestic, an anchor guided by a lady, as you see, and 
farther Her Highness willed me to send you word 
that she wished you as great good hap and safety to 
your ship as if herself were there in person, desiring 
you to have care of yourself as of that which she 
tendereth; . . . 

Further she commandeth me that you leave your 

28 



Newfoundland and Virginia 

picture with me. . . . So I commit you to the will 
and protection of God, who send us such life or death 
as He shall please, or hath appointeth. — Your true 
brother, W. Raleigh 

The fleet sailed on the 10th of July, and almost at 
once Raleigh's great ship deserted and came back 
to Plymouth. The excuse was that a fever had 
broken out on board, but Sir Humphrey declined to 
accept this excuse, and wrote to Peckham com- 
plaining that she had run from him in fair clean 
weather, and prayed that his brother Raleigh should 
make the crew ' an example to all knaves.' 

Sir Humphrey sailed on with his four small ships, 
and took possession of the coast of Newfoundland 
in the Queen's name. According to a curious custom 
the sod was cut and a hazel wand given to the per- 
former of the ceremony, in the presence of the 
captains of thirty or forty fishing boats of all 
nationalities lying off the coast. This was not the 
part of the country the expedition had first intended 
to colonize, but the territory was nominally di- 
vided among its members. Soon, however, they 
became rebellious and unmanageable, and plundered 
the fishing boats when Gilbert was on shore. Many 
were invalided home on the 'Swallow,' others died, 
and a move was made in a more southerly direction, 
toward the place where it had been originally 
designed to found the colony. 

Now calamity followed calamity. The ships were 
tossed hither and thither on the stormy Atlantic. 
Misfortune first overtook the * Delight,' which was 
wrecked, leaving the 'Golden Hinde' and the small 

29 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

cockle-shell of the 'Squirrel' to fight the seas as 
best they could alone. The poor little ' Squirrel' was 
crammed with sick and fever-stricken men, who 
implored their commander to abandon the voyage 
and set sail for home. The weather got worse, and 
terrifying monsters appeared among the waves, in 
the imaginations of the sick men. At the Azores 
it was plain that the 'Squirrel' could not survive 
much longer, yet the gallant Gilbert would not 
forsake the little craft and take refuge in the ' Golden 
Hinde,' though he was besought most earnestly to 
leave the over-crowded boat to its fate. From the 
other ship he was seen ' sitting abaft with a book in 
his hand,' and once he was heard to call out cheerily, 
'Be of good heart, my friends, we are as near to 
Heaven by sea as by land.' Soon after the 'Squirrel' 
sank and was seen no more battling against the 
waves. Thus perished the brave Sir Humphrey 
Gilbert, who had calmly faced death on the ocean 
often before, and preferred death to going back once 
more a beaten man to meet the scathing reproach 
of his Queen that he had 'no good hap at sea.' 

The loss of his distinguished brother was a great 
grief to Raleigh, but it did not dishearten him or 
turn him from the purpose on which his whole soul 
was concentrated. Sir Humphrey had failed, as 
Cabot, Willoughby and Frobisher had failed before 
him, in finding a north-west passage to China, and 
it was ordained that a younger Gilbert, Adrian, 
should succeed his brother, with Raleigh's help, in 
striving to accomplish this task. But Raleigh's 
ambition extended far beyond the discovery of a 
north-west passage. He would never be content, 

30 



Newfoundland and Virginia 

he said, till he saw an English nation flourishing on 
the other side of the Atlantic. 

The charter which had been held by Sir Humphrey 
was renewed, giving to Walter Raleigh, Esq., and his 
heirs 'free liberty to discover barbarous countries, 
not actually possessed by any Christian prince and 
inhabited by Christian people to occupy and enjoy 
the same for ever.' A condition was made that the 
Crown should receive a fifth part of all the gold and 
silver and other precious metals found. Raleigh and 
his representatives were to have power to punish, 
pardon, govern, rule; and the laws were to be *as near 
as may be agreeable to the laws of England.' 
Expedition after expedition was sent by him with 
the object of annexing and colonizing such lands. 

It should be borne in mind that Raleigh's first 
thought was always of colonization and that the 
acquiring of gold and riches came second. The evil 
of the Spanish incursion into the Indes, on the other 
hand, had always been that the chief object of the 
explorers was gold. Terrible cruelties had been in- 
flicted by the Spaniards on the native Indians to find 
out the whereabouts of their treasure. This sacking 
of towns, and the plunder of fabulous hoards of gold 
and gems, had excited the greed of the whole civil- 
ized world, and it was the desire for gold which had 
first drawn the English mariners to the West. 

It is to Raleigh's undying honour, therefore, 
that he established a higher ideal. Both he and his 
brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert believed that gold was 
only a means to serve commercial ends, not an end 
in itself. They enforced the principle that trade- 
colonization and the extension of empire were all 

31 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

more vital to the interests of England than the dis- 
covery of mere gold. Even Spain had found out 
that there were others commodities more important 
than gold in the countries it discovered. 

'Ginger, hides, tobacco and other merchandise,' 
wrote the author of a treatise published in Raleigh's 
day, showing how his enlightened ideas had taken 
hold of the more intelligent of his countrymen, *it 
may be boldly affirmed yield far more profit to the 
generality of the Spanish subjects than the mines do, 
or have done this last age. Who gave gold and 
silver the monopoly of wealth, or made them the 
Almighty's favourites? This is the richest land 
which feeds most men. What remarkable mines 
hath France, Belgium, Lombardy ? Do we not see 
that the silks, calicoes, drugs and spices of the East 
swallow up all the mines of the West ?' 

Two captains, sent out by Raleigh to reconnoitre 
the country on which he had set his heart, returned 
in 1584 with glowing descriptions. They were Philip 
Amadas and Arthur Barlow, accompanied by the 
pilot, Simon Fernandez. 

They had landed and taken possession in the 
Queen's name of a country on a coast where grapes 
grew in abundance close to the water's edge, where 
gigantic cedars spread their branches, and everything 
seemed to grow in rank luxuriance. The natives 
were peaceful and friendly, and they brought furs, 
pearls and other precious things in exchange for the 
white men's gifts. 'The King's brother,' related the 
captains, 'had a great liking for our armour, a sword 
and divers other things which he had, and offered to 
lay a great box of pearls in gage for them. But 

32 



Newfoundland and Virginia 

we refused it for this time, because we would not 
have them know we esteemed thereof, until we had 
understood in what part of the country the pearls 
grew.' 

'Surely this was the best soil under heaven' was 
their verdict when their eyes had rested for the first 
time on this rich fertile land of the West, and they 
had sailed home full of the news to Raleigh, whose 
plan was to get a firm foothold for the English on 
the northern continent of America, which should 
counterbalance the power of Spain in the South. 

When Raleigh laid the information which the 
captains had brought before the Queen, she herself 
christened the new dominion Virginia, and gave him 
carle blanche to set about colonizing it in earnest. 

The Spaniards were watching him with jealous 
eyes. They had spies in every English port. King 
Philip heard from one that 'The Queen has knighted 
Raleigh her favourite and has given him a ship of 
her own. . . . Raleigh has also bought two Dutch 
flyboats of 120 tons each to carry stores, and two 
other boats of 40 tons, in addition to which he is 
having built four pinnaces. Altogether Raleigh will 
fit out no fewer than sixteen vessels in which he 
intends to convey 400 men. The Queen has assured 
him that if he will refrain from going himself she will 
defray all the expenses of the preparations.' 

It was unfortunate for Raleigh and the success 
of the colony that the Queen's infatuation for him 
prevented his going in person. Instead, Sir Richard 
Grenville was given command of the expedition, 
and he, gallant seamen that he was, gloried in fight- 
ing and plundering, and had none of Raleigh's high 

33 



Sir TFa/ter Raleigh 

ideals with regard to the building up of a peaceable 
empire overseas. 

He was overbearing and tyrannical to the men 
under him, and converted the friendly, wild natives 
of North America into treacherous enemies by his 
want of tact and consideration. 

After houses had been built and stores landed, Gren- 
ville sailed away, leaving the budding colony under 
the governorship of Ralph Lane. He promised to re- 
turn before Easter, bringing with him fresh provisions. 

On his way home he plundered a Spanish ship, 
and took a 'fine cabinet of pearls,' among other 
treasure of gold, silver, cochineal, ivory and hides. 
It was said the Queen claimed all the pearls for 
herself, and did not give Raleigh, to whom, of course, 
the captured cargo belonged by right, 'one pearl.' 

Had Raleigh been present among the colonists, 
all might have been well. He would have infected 
them with his own enthusiasm, and exercised a dis- 
cipline which would have checked insubordination 
and private quarrels. Things had looked promising 
enough to start with, but after Grenville's departure. 
Lane found himself unable to cope with the troubles 
that arose between the settlers, and between the set- 
tlers and the Indians, who were no longer described, as 
they had been by the first explorers, as 'the most lov- 
ing, gentle and faithful, void of all guile and treason, 
and such as live after the manner of the golden age.' 

A great blow was the death of the King's brother, 
who had been particularly well-disposed toward the 
Englishmen. The King himself, on the other hand, 
plotted an insurrection against them, in the disguise 
of a chief, and was put to death. 

34 



Newfoundland and Virginia 

The colonists ploughed, sowed and planted, and 
searched for mines, but when Easter came and no 
Grenville reappearel, they became disheartened. 
Their supplies were running out, although the corn 
would soon be ready for cutting. One day in June 
they saw a fleet approaching the coast. It was not 
Grenville, but Drake, who had been struck by the 
happy thought of calling at the new colony on his 
way from the plunder and sack of Sante Domingo. 
The discouraged settlers were seized with home- 
sickness at the sight of the English ships and their 
prosperous admiral, and, in spite of his promise of 
fresh provisions, they prevailed on Drake to take 
them on board straightaway to England; thus they 
turned their backs on their savage adopted home, 
for which they had never felt any real affection. 

A ship fitted out by Raleigh was already on its 
way to relieve the distressed colonists. It arrived 
at the forsaken settlement soon after Drake had 
sailed, and was obliged to return, after searching 
for the colonists, who were no longer there, with 
its stores and supplies unused. Grenville soon 
followed on a like vain quest, but before starting 
again for England he left a handful of men to 
continue the colony on the island of Roanoak. 

It was in July 1586 that the deserters landed at 
Plymouth with Drake's fleet. Hariot, the great 
mathematician and confidential friend of Raleigh, 
had made many researches in Virginia and discovered 
the use of tobacco and potatoes, so that it was 
with the return of the disappointed colonists that 
the habit of smoking became fashionable in England. 
Raleigh introduced it at court and smoked his 

35 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

silver-bowled pipe in the Queen's presence, and all 
the Elizabethan gallants followed his example. 
But Hariot proclaimed its medicinal properties, and 
gave a delightfully quaint account of the way in 
which the Indians cultivated and used the plant. 
*By sucking it through pipes of clay,' he said, 'they 
purged all gross humours from the head and stomach, 
opened all the pores and passages of the body, pre- 
serving it from obstructions or breaking them, where- 
bye they noteably preserved their health, and knew 
not many grevious diseases wherewith we in England 
are often ajQBicted. So we ourselves while we were 
there used to suck it after their manner and have found 
many rare an 1 wonderful experiments of its virtues 
whereof the relation would require a volume by itself.' 

Hariot ma le a most learned survey of the whole 
of Virginia, showing its inexhaustible capabilities 
as a mercantile possession, and giving the lie to 
the other runaway colonists, who cited as an excuse 
for their failure the drawbacks of the country. 

*Seei ig the air there,' he writes, 'is so temperate 
and wholesome, the soil so fertile and yielding such 
commodities, the voyage to and fro to be performed 
twice a year with ease at any reason, and the dealings 
of Sir Walter Raleigh so liberal in giving and granting 
lands there, with many other helps and further- 
ances ... I hope there remains no cause whereby 
the action should be misliked.'^ 

1 'A brief and true report of the new found land of Virginia of the 
commodities there found . . . and of the nature and manner of the 
natural inhabitants discovered by the English colony there seated 
by Sir R. Grenville, K. T., in the year 1585, which remained under the 
government of Rafe Lane, Esq. . . . during the space of 12 months; 

36 



Newfoundland and Virginia 

We cannot help thinking that the secret of the 
colonists' discouragement was the paucity of gold 
in the new country and the remoteness of the chance 
of getting rich quickly. To build up a fortune slowly 
by the sweat of one's brow was not what men went 
abroad for in those golden days. Raleigh and Hariot 
were before their time in being patriotic enough to 
see how a flourishing agricultural transatlantic 
province would prove a source of lasting benefit to 
the mother-country. The brunt of the enormous 
expense of the unsuccessful expeditions to Virginia 
had been borne by Raleigh, yet he was keen to make 
another attempt directly Grenville came back. 

This time he sent a hundred and fifty picked men 
under Governor John White. They sailed from 
Portsmouth in April, 1587, a year before the Armada. 
The men who had been left by Grenville on the island 
of Roanoak were to be fetched and taken with them 
to found the new city of Raleigh, in Chesapeake 
Bay. Alas, their houses had been razed to the 
ground, and there was no trace of them left. An 
Indian who knew the English told the tale of their 
betrayal and murder. The Indians, as a whole, were 
no longer friendly to the white men, and efforts to 
conciliate them failed. However, building began 
again, and the arduous work of clearing and planting. 

White's daughter gave birth to a baby-girl, to 
whom was given the name of Virginia. This w as the 
first English child ever born in North America. In 
the midst of his domestic anxiety the Governor let 

at the special charge of Sir Walter Raleigh, K.T. ... by Thomas 
Hariot, servant of the above-named Sir Walter, a member of the 
colony, and there employed in the discoverie. London, 1588.' 

37 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

himself be persuaded to return to England to get 
fresh stores for the colony, as provisions were getting 
short. He came, unfortunately, on the eve of the 
Armada, when all ships on the English coast were 
forbidden to go out of port. 

Raleigh managed, with the utmost difficulty, to 
obtain release for two ships for the purpose of 
taking colonists and provisions out to Virginia. The 
released ships chose to go plundering instead, and 
with Governor White on board one of them they 
engaged in a fracas with pirates. They came back 
to England, leaving the unlucky Virginian colonists 
to fend for themselves. Raleigh has been blamed for 
heartlessly abandoning his colony, but in reality he 
made countless further efforts to rescue the settlers 
out of his own pocket.^ Money from other quarters 
was not forthcoming any longer. Adventurers 
realized now that there were no gold mines in 
Virginia, but preferred looting Spanish ships, an 
easier and more profitable method of earning a 
living than tilling the soil — even the rich and fertile 
soil of a new world. 

Nothing more was heard of Raleigh's little colony, 
in spite of all his endeavours to get in touch with 
it again, till the lamentable news reached him long 
afterward that all the white men had been mur- 
dered by an Indian chief. Not for another twenty 
years was a permanent English colony established 
once more in North America, but Raleigh never- 
theless had sown the seeds of colonial enterprise, 
and shaken the arrogant pretentions of Spain to 
undisputed lordship of the West. 

1 Altogether he spent £40,000 on Virginia. 
38 



CHAPTER VI: The Scatterins 
of the Armada^ and the Expedi- 
tion to Lisbon 

MANY other important things had been 
happening in these years immediately pre- 
ceding the defeat of the Armada besides 
Raleigh's ill-starred colonizing ventures in Virginia. 
There had been enterprises abroad and overseas 
which, whether they succeeded or failed, stirred the 
blood and set pulses throbbing to hear about. 

Queen Elizabeth had lost the brightest jewel of 
her court in the death of Sir Philip Sidney, who, on 
the battle-field of Zutphen, after gallantly fighting 
in the Dutch wars, was wounded mortally, and by 
an act of divine selfishness gained a more lasting 
fame than by all his graces and talents. In the 
same year a greater ornament of her reign, and one 
who was not 'for an age but for all time,' came up 
from Stratford to London, a stripling called William 
Shakespeare, who had already written his Mid- 
summer Nighfs Dream, and was yet to write the 
tragedies and comedies that we all know. In Ireland 
Spenser had been writing his Faerie Queene, and the 
immortal genius of Christopher Marlowe, the young 
Londoner whose life was to be cut off in a tavern 
brawl, had borne splendid fruit. 

It was on a February day, in the year before the 
Armada, that bells had rung out from the steeples 
to proclaim that the beautiful head of the Catholic 
Scottish Queen, so long the captive and the terror of 
Elizabeth, had fallen from the scaffold. And now 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

the world buzzed with rumours of the coming 
vengeance of Spain, of the towering galleons she was 
building, to be commanded by the flower of her 
aristocracy, destined for a death-grapple with the 
Protestant power; when old scores were to be 
settled once for all against British seamen, who had 
dared so insolently to plunder Spanish gold-ships 
and sack Spanish towns. 

From John o'Groats to Land's End, in county towns 
and remotest villages, people talked of the coming of 
the Spaniard, and were prepared to meet him. 

As a preliminary. Sir Francis Drake, that most 
daring captain, had sailed from Plymouth on the 
'Bonventure' straight into Cadiz harbour and burnt 
eighty of Philip's ships, which he called 'singeing 
his Spanish Majesty's beard,' and then he bore on 
triumphantly to the coast of Portugal, where he saw 
the Armada preparing, and challenged the veteran 
Spanish admiral, Santa Cruz, to come forth and do 
battle with him there and then. Could the challenge 
have been accepted, no huge fleet of Spanish galleons, 
as 'tall as church spires,' would have appeared later 
in the English Channel. But the great ships were 
not yet manned, and before they were ready, Santa 
Cruz died, and Philip appointed as admiral of the 
fleet an incompetent grandee, the Duke of Medina 
Sidonia, who had run away from Cadiz when Drake 
came into the harbour, and who had never been to 
sea in his life except in a pleasure boat. He left 
his orange gardens with reluctance, and had no heart 
for his high quest. All his hopes were set on falling 
in with the Duke of Parma, the powerful and cruel 
Spanish general who was to come from the Nether- 

40 



The Scattering of the Armada 

lands, where he had been persecuting the Flemish 
Protestants with the finest infantry in the world, 
to finish on land the work of destruction to be begun 
by the Armada at sea. 

Elizabeth, in spite of all the stories told her of 
these gigantic preparations on the part of Spain to 
annihilate the power of England and the Protestant 
religion, was unwilling for war. At any rate she re- 
fused to declare war, and in order to ensure peace, 
she talked of abandoning the Protestant towns 
in the Low Countries, and giving them back to 
Spain, although her soldiers had been pouring out 
their blood like water to hold them for the natives 
against Parma. Drake had won no open approval 
from the Queen by his escapade at Cadiz for this 
reason, yet she winked at his waylaying the 
magnificent caraque, *San Philip,' loaded with a 
rich cargo from the Indes. In the early days of 
June it was towed into Dartmouth Harbour, and 
crowds of West Country folks, in hoHday attire, 
flocked to see the distribution of its fabulous freight, 
said to be worth half a million. Raleigh was in 
Devonshire at the time, doing his part in raising a 
contingent of 2000 men for national defence against 
invasion. He was busy, too, strengthening fortifica- 
tions at Portsmouth, and gave his advice in the con- 
struction of defences at Plymouth and Portland. 

But this is all we know of his share in the glories 
of the Armada victory. It is disappointing to 
have no record of this striking figure of Elizabeth's 
court, playing a heroic role in the most stirring event 
of her reign. Some of Raleigh's biographers have 
tried to prove that he was on board the conquering 

41 



Sir JVa/ter Raleigh 

fleet on the 23rd of July 1588 and witnessed the 
fighting in the Channel. History, however, is silent 
on the subject, and he certainly can have had no 
command. We must be satisfied then with drawing 
an imaginary picture of the favourite riding with 
the Queen to that scene of delirious enthusiasm at 
Tilbury Camp, when, as generalissimo of the army, 
she came in martial pomp, wearing a breastplate 
and a farthingale, to harangue the brave soldiers and 
sailors who, owing to her short-sighted economy, had 
been languishing at Plymouth on mouldy rations and 
bad water. Only when the imminent danger which 
threatened her throne and kingdom was brought 
home to her did the Queen at last rise to the occasion. 
The clouds of depression which had hung over her 
since the execution of her prisoner, Mary Queen of 
Scots, dispersed, and she finally cast to the winds her 
scruples about going to war with her brother-in-law, 
recognizing indeed that it was a case of war to the 
knife. She could no longer blind herself to the 
fact that Philip had been plotting against her life 
with his Jesuit spies and emissaries for the last 
fifteen years, and that now Mary was gone, he 
entertained the idea of putting his own daughter on 
the English throne instead of Elizabeth, and making 
England a province of Spain. 

It was on a Saturday in July that the invincible 
Armada was sighted off the Lizard. The English 
fleet under the Lord High Admiral Howard, Drake, 
Hawkins and Frobisher, came out to meet it, and 
these famous sea-dogs, with their superior fighting 
craft and seamanship and the help of such a storm 
that none in the memory of man had been known 

42 




'RALEIGH RIDING WITH THE QUEEN AT TILBURY CAMP" 

— Page ],2 



The Scattering of the Armada 

to rage so long and fiercely, swept the proud 
galleons from the Channel. That storm strewed the 
coast of Ireland with the flower of Spain's nobility. 
Grandees and hidalgos in velvet coats and chains of 
gold perished there miserably of starvation, or were 
plundered and butchered by the half-savage Irish, 
from whom they had vainly hoped, as being of the 
same faith as themselves, comfort and succour. 

Thus briefly we pass over the all-important victory 
in which Raleigh seems to have played no prominent 
part (though it must not be forgotten that the 
finest ship in the English fleet, the * Ark-Raleigh,' 
had been planned and built by him), and come to 
the Portuguese expedition of the following year, in 
which we find him active and associated with Essex. 

Englishmen were more than ever confident, after 
the tragic fate of the Armada, that they were born 
to rule the waves and be supreme on the ocean. 
The desire for plundering adventures increased and 
spread among all classes. English privateers (Ral- 
eigh's among them) scoured the seas. It was a good 
opportunity for Don Antonio, the ex-king of Portu- 
gal, who had been an exile in England for eight years, 
to appeal for help to be restored to the Portuguese 
throne, which Philip had usurped. 

He had already received aid from Catharine de' 
Medici, the French Queen-Mother, but Elizabeth 
so far had done nothing but gull him with fine 
promises. 

Now an army of 16,000 soldiers, with 2500 sailors, 
was raised w^ith the purpose of reinstating Don 
Pedro on his throne, in retaliation and defiance of 
the King of Spain. 

43 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

The land forces were commanded by Sir John 
Norris, and Drake commanded at sea. Raleigh and 
Essex both joined the expedition as volunteers. Es- 
sex was forbidden, of course, to go at the last minute, 
and was so violently jealous at the idea of Raleigh 
getting away while he was detained in attendance 
on the Queen, that he escaped from court, rushed 
to Plymouth in disguise and got on board the * Swift- 
sure.' Before he could be caught, the 'Swiftsure' 
put to sea without Drake's orders, to the frantic 
fury of the Queen, who held Drake and Norris 
responsible for her renegade younger favourite's de- 
sertion. After this she discountenanced the whole 
enterprise, especially as it did not attain its object. 
Drake and Raleigh wanted to sail up the Tagus to 
Lisbon, but Don Antonio, with Norris and Essex, 
being soldiers rather than sailors, preferred an over- 
land march to the city. They had no guns and no 
commissariat, and the Portuguese, instead of flinging 
wide the gates of Lisbon and receiving their returned 
sovereign with open arms, gave no sign of welcome. 
While Drake waited to re-embark Norris's army off 
the coast, he was employed in searching for prizes, 
and captured a number of German hulks loaded with 
cargoes for the Spaniards. There was a great deal of 
disputing over the apportioning of the treasure, but 
probably Raleigh got a handsome share of the profits. 
On the return of the futile excursion he was at first 
treated graciously by the Queen and given a gold chain 
as a token of regard, while his rival was plunged in sore 
disgrace. Before long, however, Essex succeeded in 
pacifying Elizabeth, and to such good purpose that he 
made the court temporarily unbearable for Raleigh. 

44 



The Scattering of the Armada 

* My Lord of Essex hath chased Mr Raleigh from 
court and hath confined him to Ireland,' wrote a 
correspondent of Anthony Bacon's. 

The gossip reached Raleigh's ears and his proud 
spirit resented it, for after his visit to Ireland he 
found occasion to contradict it in a letter to his 
cousin, George Carew. 

Tor my retreat from court it was upon good cause 
to take order for my prize,' he explained. *If in 
Ireland they think that I am not worth respecting, 
they shall much deceive themselves. I am in place 
not inferior to any man . . . and my opinion is so 
received as I can anger the best of them. . . . ' 

Fitzwilliams, who was then Lord Deputy, and 
evidently not friendly to Raleigh, is alluded to in 
the same letter. 

*When Sir William Fitzwilliams shall be in Eng- 
land, I take myself for his better by the honourable 
offices I hold, as also by that nearness to Her Maj- 
esty which I still enjoy, and never more. . . .' 

It is true enough that Raleigh had plenty to do 
in Ireland. The planting, mining, draining and 
cultivation of his extensive estates kept him well 
employed, and he rebuilt the Castle of Lismore in 
splendid style. Besides, he found time to cultivate 
literature which, in the manifold occupations of his 
life as courtier, member of Parliament, and Empire- 
builder, he had been bound to neglect, much as he 
loved it. So, whether or no his 'retreat' to Ireland 
was enforced, it brought him many compensations, 
among them, as we shall see, first and foremost, the 
friendship of Edmund Spenser, *the poets' poet.' 



45 



CHAPTER VII: Raleigh and 

Spenser 

NINE years before, in the time of the 
Desmond rebellion, when Captain Raleigh 
had been so active in clearing Munster of 
the unfortunate Irish at the point of the sword, 
Edmund Spenser was Lord Grey's secretary, and 
the two young poets had become acquainted. 
But their lives had since been cast in different 
places, and it was not till this breathing-space for 
Raleigh, in the year after the Armada, that they 
met again. 

The old castle of Kilcolman, in which Spenser 
lived for ten years in peaceful seclusion, had belong- 
ed to the hunted earls of Desmond. It was a roman- 
tic, half -ruined abode, standing on the north side of 
a lake, with a view of half the breadth of Ireland. 
Here, amidst the green woodlands and misty blue 
mountains, Spenser * sweetly sang,' and produced 
his immortal poems. Here his old Cambridge friend, 
the pedantic scholar, Gabriel Harvey, was his guest, 
and here Sir Walter Raleigh, when he was in Cork 
in 1589, came over from his neighbouring castle of 
Lismore to visit him, and, later, to carry off the poet 
for a time to Gloriana's court, where the lustre of 
his genius might shine before men instead of being 
buried in the wilds of Ireland. 

A full account of this memorable visit of Raleigh's 
to Spenser is given in Colin Cloufs Come Home 
Againe, the quaint and charming autobiographical 
poem which Spenser wrote and dedicated to the 

46 



Raleigh and Spenser 

'Shepherd of the Ocean' when he returned to Ire- 
land from London in 1591. 

Colin tells his brother shepherds of his 'passed 
fortunes,' and begins with Raleigh's visit. One day 
he relates that, as he sat 

Under the foote of Mole, that mountain hore, 

Keeping my sheep among the coolly shade 

Of the green alders by the Mullai shore. 

There a strange shepherd chanced to find me out. 

Whether allured with my pipe's delight. 

Whose pleasing sound yshrilled far about. 

Or whether led by chance, I know not right. 

Whom when I asked from what place he came, 

And how he hight himself he did ycleepe 

The Shepherd of the Ocean by name. 

And said he came from the main sea deep. 

He sitting me beside in that same shade 

Provoked me to play some pleasant fit. 

And when he heard the music that I made 

He found himself full greatly pleased at it. 

Then his guest, 'as skilful in that art as any,' 
'piped' — 

His song was all a lamentable lay 

Of great unkindness and of usage hard. 

Of Cynthia the ladie of the sea,^ 

Which from her presence faultless him debarred, 

And ever and anon with singults rife 

He cried out to make his undersong; 

Ah! my love's Queen and goddess of my life. 

Who shall me pity when thou dost me wrong. 

And after they had done singing and piping in 
turn, the Shepherd of the Ocean 

Queen Elizabeth. 
47 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

Gan to cast great lyking to my lore. 
And great dislyking to my luckless lot 
That banisht had myself like wight forlorn 
Into that waste where I was quite forgot. 

And then Raleigh persuaded Colin to accompany 
him *his Cynthia to see.' 

He took with him the MS. of the first three books 
of The Faerie Queene, which were ready for publica- 
tion and dedicated to the 

Most Mightie and Magnificent 
EMPRESSE 

RENOWNED FOR PIETIE, VIRTUE, AND ALL GRATIOUS GOVERNMENT 

ELIZABETH 

BY THE Grace of God 
Queen of England, France and Ireland, and of Virginia 

No doubt it was Spenser's great desire to get his 
masterpiece (as far as he had written it) published 
that led to his accepting Raleigh's invitation. Sir 
Walter, on his side, may have wished to introduce 
his friend at court as a peace-offering to his offended 
Queen. If this was so, the plan met with complete 
success, for all misunderstanding vanished and he 
was restored to favour. Spenser was presented by 
him to Elizabeth, and she was not slow to recognize 
his genius. 

*That goddess,' he says: 

To mine oaten pipe enclin'd her ear 
That she thenceforth therein gan take delight. 
And it desired at timely hours to hear 
Al were my notes but rude and roughly dight. 
48 



Raleigh and Spenser 

The letter of the author's, prefixed to his poem 
(dated Jan. 3rd, 1589), * expounding the whole in- 
tention in the course of this worke which for that it 
giveth great light to the reader for the better under- 
standing is hereunto annexed,' was addressed to 
*Sir Walter Raleigh, Knight, Lord Warden of the 
Stanneries and her Majesty's Liefetenant of the 
County of Cornewayll.' Shortly afterward, in 1590, 
Master William Ponsonby pubhshed ^Tlie Faerie 
Queene Disposed into Twelve Books, Fashioning XII 
moral virtues.' 

Thus to Raleigh's critical insight was due the 
appearance of the wonderful allegory, the great 
awakening in English poetry for which men had 
been waiting in vain since Chaucer died, and for this 
alone the world owes him a debt of gratitude. 

The Queen's patronage obtained for Spenser a 
pension of £50 a year, though her treasurer. Lord 
Burleigh, grumbled at paying it, and said, 'What.? 
All this for a song.?' The poet had caught to 
perfection the trick of flattery which Elizabeth's 
vanity and belief in her unfading charms had made 
the fashion of the time. The Faerie Queene immortal- 
ized her as Gloriana, the Empress of all Nobleness; 
Belphoebe, the princess of all that was sweet and 
beautiful; Brotomart, the armed vestal of pure 
Chastity, and Mercilla, the compassionate and 
gentle, and it was herself in the poem more than 
the poem itself which delighted the Queen. The 
great literature then springing up, of which she 
was the supposed inspiration, was really little more 
to her, in spite of her great learning and scholarly 
education, than a monument of that stupendous 

49 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

flattery for which her appetite was insatiable, and 
to which all the men of light and leading of those 
times so shamelessly pandered. Probably the ex- 
quisite music was lost on her of the 'lovely lay' 
of Temptation and other glorious passages in which 
she was not referred to, while she gloated on 
being likened to 

A crown of lilies 
Upon a virgin brydes adorned head 
With roses dight and golden daflFodillies new. 

Great as was the general delight and enchantment 
with which the first three books of TheF aerie Queene 
were hailed, it is probable that, then as now, those 
who appreciated the beauty and spirituality of the 
poem most were men of the same craft. It depicted 
a world that was departed, the world of chivalry 
and romance. It was animated by the spirit of the 
past, and its very language was archaic, so that it 
was bound to appeal more to the cultured few than 
to the community at large. 

In spite of its instantaneous success, Spenser 
went back, after a year and a half's sojourn in 
London, to his old castle in Ireland, a disappointed 
man. The glamour of the court of Gloriana had 
soon worn off for the poet: its intrigues, self-seekings 
and scandals had no charm for him, and when once 
more settled in his own home he recorded his bitter 
regret at having remained there so long in hopes 
of advancement. 

For little knowest thou that hast not tried 
What hell it is in suing long to bide. 
To locse good dayes that might be better spent, 
50 



Raleigh and Spenser 

To waste long nights in pensive discontent. 
To spend to-day, to be put back to-morrow. 
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow. 



As he sat again in his quiet retreat in the 'saddest 
of all countries,' as he himself described it, 'though' 
as beautiful as any under heaven,' he reviewed the 
splendid scenes he had lately visited, enumerated: 
the famous wits he had met and the lovely ladies| 
he had seen in London, and dedicated this quaint! 
diary to the friend who had introduced him into] 
the brilliant world of court society. 

The latter, much as he might cherish the gentle" 
poet's friendship and company, had become more 
and more absorbed in those great schemes in which 
public spirit and private greed were so singularly 
mingled. Often Spenser must have waited, neg- 
lected, in Raleigh's ante-chamber at Durham House 
while Sir Walter interviewed the captains of his pri- 
vateers and other mariners and travellers from the 
high seas. The restless man of action was a little 
intolerant, perhaps, of the poet's dreaminess, and 
seems to have reproached Spenser with being lazy. 

*That you may see,' he wrote, 'that I am not 
always idle as you think, though not greatly well 
occupied, nor altogether undutiful, though not pre- 
cisely officious I make you present of this simple 
pastoral, unworthie of your higher conceit for the 
meanesse of the stile, but agreeing with the truth 
in circumstance and matter. For which I humbly 
beseech you to accept in part of paiment of the 
infinite debt in which I acknowledge myself boun- 
den unto you for your singular favours and sundrie 

51 



Sir JValter Raleigh 

good turnes shewed to me at my late being in 
England.' 

And this may be a convenient place to consider 
Faleigh not only as the patron of a poet, but as a 
poet himself. 

His letters and the fragments of his mighty History 
of the World, which belongs to the last and most 
tragic phase of his long career, prove him to have 
been one of the most consummate masters of digni- 
fied prose. But not much of his authenticated 
poetry has come down to us, yet he must have 
written a great deal at one time or another. He 
set little store by his verse, and rarely took the 
trouble to have it printed. For the most part he 
appears to have regarded the making of verse as 
merely a distraction for his scant hours of leisure. 

A contemporary gave his poetry the following 
praise : 

'For ditty and amorous ode, I find Sir Walter 
Raleigh's vein most lofty, insolent and passionate.'^ 

A finer compliment still is paid to his muse in 
Spenser's beautiful sonnet at the end of The Faerie 
Queene, beginning: 

To thee that are the Summer's Nightingale, 
Thy sovereign goddess's most dear delight, 
Why do I send this rustic madrigal 
That may thy tuneful ears unseason quite? 

In answer to Spenser's address to him in The 
Faerie Queene, Raleigh wrote an exquisite sonnet, 
and the man who could write it, even if he had never 

^Pattenham's Art of Poesie. 
52 



I 



Raleigh and Spenser 

written another line, might certainly claim to be a 
poet of the first rank. 

Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay 

Within that temple where the vestal flame 

Was wont to burn; and passing by that way 

To see that buried dust of living fame, 

Whose tomb fair love and fairer virtue kept. 

All suddenly I saw the Faerie Queen, 

At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept; 

And from thenceforth those graces were not seen 

For they this Queen attended; in whose stead 

Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse. 

Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed. 

And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce. 

Where Homer's sprite did tremble all for grief. 

And cursed the access of that celestial thief. 

The authorship of a poem written in reply to 
Marlowe's jocund pastoral, Come Live with me, 
and he my Love, had been ascribed to Raleigh, 
but there is no evidence to support the assumption 
that he wrote it, though the lines are tinged with a 
melancholy pessimism very characteristic of the 
mood in which Raleigh seems to have indited most 
of his verse. In his rarer, lighter vein, however, he 
could throw off with ease light and playful trifles, 
such as Phillida's Love Call to her Cory don, which 
breathes the air of the country-side and the ingenu- 
ous joys of Arcadia. 

What Spenser called Raleigh's 'excellent conceit 
of Cynthia' was supposed to have been entirely lost 
till quite recently, when a sequel to it, in the hand- 
writing of Raleigh, was found at Hatfield. 

When he was only twenty-four, and still quite 
unknown to fame, Raleigh wrote the dedicatory 

53 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

stanzas to a satirical poem by his fellow law-student, 
George Gascoign, The Steel Glass. They contained 
a couplet, often quoted to-day, strangely prophetic 
of the unpopularity his climb to the top of the ladder 
brought him : 

For who so reaps renown above the rest. 
With heaps of hate shall surely be oppressed. 

Undoubtedly Raleigh's best efforts were inspired 
by despondency and depression and not written in 
his glittering hours of success. The Lie is full of 
bitterness and revolt, and brought many scathing 
retorts from its author's enemies. His finest literary 
work indeed, both in prose and verse, was accom- 
plished in the quietude of prison life. 

*His imprisonments,' says Prof. Hales in The 
English Poets, *were in fact his salvation. Through 
the Traitor's Gate he passed to a tranquillity and 
thoughtfulness for which there was no opportunity 
outside. In his cell in the White Tower his soul 
found and enjoyed a real freedom.' 



54 



CHAPTER: VII 'The Revenge' 
and Raleigh's Marriage 

THE way was paved for Raleigh's reconcilia- 
tion with his royal mistress still further 
when he arrived at Court with Spenser, 
in 1590, by the death of Leicester, followed soon 
afterward by the deaths of Hatton, the dancing 
chancellor, and of Walsingham. ^ 

Another event which militated in his favour was 
that Essex was in dire disgrace through his clan- 
destine marriage with Sir Philip Sidney s widow, 
whom the Queen considered * beneath his degree, 
and treated in the most insulting manner. The 
bride lived *very retired in her mother's house, 
and was ignored by the court, but the bridegroom 
before long was forgiven by his infatuated sover- 
eign, though not before Raleigh had managed to 
step gracefully again into the position of first 
favourite. He made hay while the sun shone, and 
during Essex's absence in France, where, to the 
warlike young Earl's great satisfaction, he was 
marshalling a force under King Henry of Navarre 
against Spain, Raleigh obtained the appointment 
of vice-admiral of a fleet, to be sent to the Azores to 
intercept one of Philip's on its way back from the 

West. 

The Crown countenanced secretly these plunder- 
ing enterprises, which were really nothing better 
than piratical buccaneering. It was the rage tor 
young English gentlemen of quality to seek fame 
and fortune on the high seas, and it afforded them 
the same sort of excitement as football and horse- 



55 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

racing does in these days. Spanish ships were to be 
met with all over the ocean, and they were consid- 
ered fair game in times of war or peace. 

Though she was careful to risk as little as possible, 
the grasping Queen invariably netted the largest 
share of the profits. Sometimes she made a pre- 
tence of disapproval at her admirals behaving like 
common pirates, but she never failed to haggle with 
them afterward over the booty. Once when she 
had feigned great wrath with Raleigh for allowing 
his privateers to plunder certain ships, she neverthe- 
less asserted her right to a 'carnation waistcoat' 
which had been taken from a Spanish grandee, and 
appealed irresistibly to her love of fine apparel. 

The expedition to the Azores in question was 
planned to waylay Philip's silver fleet, and if it 
succeeded would be enormously profitable to Raleigh 
and all concerned. Lord Howard was to be in 
supreme command of the squadron, consisting of 
^Y^ of the Queen's ships, some cargo ships belonging 
to the city of London, and the * Bark-Raleigh.' 

But when it came to the point, Elizabeth refused 
to spare her Captain of the Guard, Essex being still 
away in France. Raleigh's cousin, the old sea-dog 
of Devon, Sir Richard Grenville, was appointed 
vice-admiral instead of him, and it is easy to under- 
stand how his adventurous kinsman must have 
chafed and fumed with disappointment. 

The expedition started in the early spring, but the 
silver fleet had been detained that year by heavy 
gales on the American coast, and Howard's ships 
waited for it all through the summer and autumn. 
While they were at anchor off Flores, the men suffer- 

56 



The Revenge 

ing from scurvy and fever, and several of the crews 
ashore, the Spanish fleet, consisting of two squadrons 
of fifty-three ships each well manned and all ready 
and trim for action, sailed up. So rapidly did they 
come that some of the English ships had not time to 
obey Lord Howard's order to weigh anchor and get 
away. Sir Richard Grenville, on his little * Revenge' 
waited to take up the men who were ashore, and 
found himself in a tight place between the coast and 
the Spaniards. His one chance of escape was to 
turn sail briskly, and he was advised to take this 
course. 

*No, ' replied the old seaman, *I would rather die 
than dishonour myself, my country, and Her 
Majesty's ship by flying from Spaniards. I will 
force my way through.' 

Now followed the wonderful and celebrated fight 
of which the English navy has a right to be proud. 
A poet of our own day has sung of it (who does not 
know Tennyson's lines) : 

Into the hands of God, but 
Not into the hands of Spain, 

and Raleigh made his debut as a writer of prose 
by contributing a graphic account of it to Hakluyt's 
tales of travel. Though he was not present, he 
heard the story from eye-witnesses, and described it 
vividly in his * Report of the Truth of the Fight 
about the Azores. ' 

Tall and mighty galleons crowded round the little 
'Revenge' and wedged her in. Again and again its 
decks were swept by Spanish musketry, and Span- 
iards swarmed like ants up its sides to be dashed 

57 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

back headlong into the sea. All night the battle 
raged and the boom of the guns rose above the shouts 
of command and the moans of the dying. Single- 
handed, Grenville opposed his ship to fifteen great 
galleons, and after he himself had been riddled and 
shattered by severe wounds, he still stood upon the 
poop with blazing eyes and grinding teeth. 

* Nothing was to be seen,' writes Raleigh in his 
account of the fray, *but the naked hull of a ship 
and that almost a skeleton, having received 800 
shell of great artillery; her deck covered with the 
limbs and carcases of 40 valiant men, the rest all 
wounded and painted with their own blood; her 
masts beat overboard, all her tackle cut asunder and 
she herself incapable of receiving any direction or 
motion except that given her by the billows. ' 

When all hope was dead, and men, arms and am- 
munition had almost come to an end, Sir Richard 
ordered the ship to be sunk. But the men thought 
that enough had been done for honour that day, 
and it would be no disgrace now to accept the terms 
the admiring Spaniards were willing to offer. So 
the brave old lion allowed himself to be reasoned 
with and at last gave in. Half-dying they carried 
him from the shambles of his deck on to a Spanish 
ship, where he and the battered remnant of his crew 
were chivalrously tended by the enemy. He died 
three days afterward uttering the famous words, 
*Here dies Richard Grenville with a joyful and 
quiet mind, having ended my life like a true soldier 
that has fought for his country, Queen, religion and 
honour. ' 

Nothing daunted by the ill-success of this venture, 

58 




'THE BATTLE BETWEEN THE SPANISH FLEET AND THE 
REVENGE— Pa(/e 57 



The Revenge 

Raleigh soon had another on foot to avenge his noble 
kinsman Grenville's death. The winter of 1591-92 
found him buwsy planning an expedition on a large 
scale, with the twofold object in view of an attack 
upon the Spanish settlement of Panama and the 
raiding of another fleet of silver-laden caracks from 
the West Indies. He flung himself passionately and 
recklessly into the preparations for this great new 
coup, and staked all he had on the enterprise. By 
the time spring came his plans were ripe, and he 
strained like a hound on the leash to put them into 
execution. Raleigh's violent invectives against the 
ambition of Spain in his vigorous before-mentioned 
* Report of the Truth of the Fight about the Isle 
of the Azores between the Revenge and an Armada 
of the King of Spain,' had hit their mark, and so 
stirred up the old animus that capital flowed in. 

Thirteen fair ships supplied by adventurers lay 
in Chatham dockyard, and two men-of-war con- 
tributed by the Queen, 'The Garland' and 'The 
Foresight,' lay at Greenwich. This time Raleigh 
was to have supreme command, his vice-admiral 
being Sir John Borough. The fleet was ready to 
start, but delayed by an unusuafly long spell of 
contrary winds. One can imagine the impatience 
of Raleigh with the elements. He dreaded that at 
any moment the Queen might change her mind 
about letting him go. For already she had begun 
to talk of his yielding up the command to Frobisher, 
and just at this time Raleigh knew that he walked 
on the edge of a volcano with regard to his relations 
with the Queen. 

He had followed Essex's example and made a 

59 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

secret marriage. Beautiful Elizabeth Throgmor- 
ton, ^ the fairest of the Queen's maids of honour, had 
captured his heart long before, but he had not dared 
to declare his love openly for fear of exciting her 
Majesty's jealous wrath. In spite of the secrecy 
and caution with which Sir Walter's courtship had 
been conducted, rumours of it were now rife. 

*Sir Walter Raleigh as it seemeth hath been too 
inward with one of her Majesty's maids,' wrote a 
gossip of the court. *I fear to say who. He hath 
escaped from London for a time; he will be speedily 
sent for and brought back and what awaiteth him 
no one knows except by conjecture. All think the 
Tower will be his dwelling, like hermit poor in 
pensive place, where he may spend his endless days 
of doubt.' 

The Queen had not so far got wind of the report 
about her favourite, and dread of discovery still 
hung like a sword of Damocles over his handsome 
head. 

As he gazed at his noble ships in Chatham port, 
waiting for the favourable breeze, which fate per- 
versely withheld, to spread their sails at his word of 

* She was the daughter of Sir Nicholas Throgmorton, who had been 
in the Tower in Queen Mary's reign for supposed complicity in Wyatt's 
rebellion. Queen Elizabeth held him in high esteem, and made him 
her Chief Butler and Chamberlain of the Exchequer. A portrait of 
Lady Raleigh, *painted by some masterly hand in 1600,' is described 
by Hentzler in his Travels through England as being of 'A fair and 
handsome woman turned perhaps of thirty — she has on a dark- 
coloured hanging sleeve robe tufted on the arms. Under it a close- 
bodied gown of white satin flowered with black with sleeves down 
to the wrist ... a lace whisk rising above her shoulders, a bosom 
uncovered and a jewel hanging thereon.' 

60 



The Revenge 

command, the thought of what delay might mean 
almost maddened Raleigh and made for the moment 
a coward of him. He, the man of great intellect, 
chivalrous instincts, and generous impulses; he who 
had brought the ideals of the knight errant of 
Spenserian romance into practical life; who was 
to display a careless courage and splendid gallantry 
in many an adventure before he passed through 
Traitor's Gate — this man was base enough to give 
the lie direct to rumours of his marriage with a 
lovely girl, who made him the noblest and most 
devoted of wives till his chequered life was ended. 

'I mean not to come away,' he wrote to the 
Queen's secretary, Robert Cecil, from Chatham, 'as 
they say I will for fear of a marriage. If any such 
thing were I would have imparted it to yourself before 
any man living, and therefore I pray believe it not, 
and I beseech you to suppress any such malicious 
report. For I protest before God there is none on 
the face of the earth that I would be fastened to.' 

Westerly breezes continued to keep the fleet port- 
bound all through April, and Raleigh on tenter- 
hooks. We can fancy how, as he looked out on the 
grey and silent river and the great ships anchored 
there motionless, tantalizing visions of them racing 
over the green bosom of the open sea, with all their 
pearly sails, fore and aft, billowing above the brown 
shapely hulls, arose before his eyes to make theirs 
and his enforced inactivity a positive torture. 

He wrote despondently that he was ' more grieved 
for this cross weather "than he had ever been" for 
anything in this world.' 

Not till the end of May did the wind change to the 

61 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

right quarter, and come rioting dry and boisterous 
from the east. Then the squadron put to sea, 
but it had scarcely set sail before Frobisher followed 
with orders that he was to come back to court with- 
out delay. However, trusting that his denial of the 
rumours concerning his marriage would be believed, 
he had the temerity to continue his voyage in defi- 
ance of the Queen's command. All would be well, 
he thought, if he returned covered with glory. But 
this was not to be. Information reached him that 
the Spanish plate fleet was not going to venture 
forth this season, and it was too late in the year for 
the attack on Panama. He was further disheart- 
ened by a storm off Cape Finisterre. So he dis- 
patched one detachment of his damaged ships under 
Frobisher to the coast of Spain, * therebye to amuse 
the Spanish fleet,' and sent Borough with the rest to 
the Azores on plunder bent, while he himself reluc- 
tantly turned tail to obey the Queen's behest. When 
he reached England he soon learnt that a worse 
storm than that which he had encountered at Finis- 
terre awaited him in London. The story of his mar- 
riage to the fair maid of honour had come out at 
court, and the Queen, to whom all marriages among 
her exalted subjects was a personal affront, though 
she sometimes danced at the weddings of humbler 
people, was 'fiercely incensed.' 

This was a far more serious affair than the favour- 
ite's first disgrace. He was arrested and put in the 
Tower, to the unqualified joy of his enemies, the 
friends of Essex,and though released after eight weeks' 
captivity, it was many a long day before he was for- 
given and admitted as of old to the royal presence. 

62 



CHAPTER IX: The 'Madre 
de Dios^ 

IT cannot be said that Raleigh endured his first 
taste of imprisonment in the Tower with dignity 
and patience. On the contrary, his efforts to 
appease the infuriated Queen, even when we make 
allowances for the exaggerated flattery that was the 
fashion of the time, seems to us grovelling and con- 
temptible. In a letter dated from the Tower to 
Robert Cecil, he wrote in the following highfalutin 
strain: 

"My heart was never broken till this day that I 
hear the Queen goes so far off — (she was starting 
on one of her Progresses) — whom I have followed so 
many years with so great love and desire in so many 
journeys, and am now left behind her in a dark 
prison all alone. While she was yet near at hand 
that I might hear of her once in two or three days my 
sorrows were less, but even now my heart is cast into 
the depths of all misery. I that was wont to behold 
her riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walk- 
ing like Venus, the gentle wind blowing her fair hair 
about her pure cheeks like a nymph, sometimes 
sitting in the shade like a goddess, sometimes sing- 
ing like an angel, sometimes playing like Orpheus, 
Behold the sorrow of this world! Once amiss hath 
bereaved me of all. . . . Who is the judge of friend- 
ship but adversity? or when is grace witnessed but 
in offences.^ There were no divinity but by reason 
of compassion, for revenges are brutish and mortal. 
All those times past — the loves, the sighs, the sor- 
rows, the desires, can they not weigh down one frail 

63 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

misfortune? Cannot one drop of gall be hidden in 
so great heaps of sweetness? I may then conclude 
B'pes etfortuna valete. She is gone in whom I trusted 
and of me hath not one thought of mercy, nor any 
respect of that that was. Do write me therefore 
what you list. I am more weary of life than they 
are desirous I should perish, which, if it had been 
for her, as it is by her, I had been too happily born. 
Yours not worthy any name or title. — W. R." 

A sardonic smile must have flitted over the face 
of the hunch-backed secretary, Cecil, as he read 
this effusion, knowing as he did that it was not meant 
for his eye alone, but that the writer lived in hopes 
of his letter being passed on to her Majesty. 

From his prison window, Raleigh beheld one day 
the Queen's barge pass by, and the Queen herself 
standing on the deck. This gave him the opportunity 
of acting, or rather over-acting, a role. He stretched 
out his arms and swore that it was the "torment of 
Tantalus" to see his mistress thus and not to go to 
her. But he would go to her, he vowed, as he made 
a feint of getting out of the window, but Sir George 
Carew, his keeper, caught him by the sleeve, and a 
mock struggle ensued. Sir Walter drew his dagger 
and tore Sir George's periwig from his head and got 
his own arm so badly wrenched in the fray that 
probably he was disabled for a time from writing 
any more passionate tirades to the Queen's 
secretary. 

In the September of that year, when Raleigh was 
still in the Tower, all the world and his wife in Devon 
again flocked to Dartmouth. Sir Walter's good 
ship, 'Roebuck,' from which he had been so sum- 



64 



The Madre de Dios 

marily recalled, had distinguished herself and re- 
deemed the whole expedition from failure by captur- 
ing the great carrack * Madre de Dios' (Mother of 
God), which, with her cargo of spices, musk, pepper, 
cloves, cinnamon, and cochineal, her silken and 
tapestry hangings and precious stones, worth 40,000 
cruzadoes, was the richest prize ever brought to 
England. 

The sacred name of the gigantic ship, and the 
almost inconceivable wealth her hold contained, 
seized the popular imagination, and the excitement 
upon her arrival in an English harbour knew no 
bounds. Before even she was towed into port, 
pilfering began, though Sir John Borough declared 
the whole cargo Queen's property, to touch which 
was treasonable. The Queen sent her secretary. 
Sir Robert Cecil, to stop the pillage, but before he 
reached the spot some of the sailors had crammed 
their pockets and trunks with treasure. One 
mariner alone of Saltern (Raleigh's birthplace) 
brought in his baggage to his humble home ' a chain 
of orient pearls, two chains of gold, four great pearls 
of the bigness of a fair pea, four forks of crystal, four 
spoons of crystal set with gold and stones, and two 
cords of musk." The ships' crew were indignant 
when they heard that their master, Raleigh, was a 
prisoner in the Tower, and it was difficult to keep 
them in hand. Sir John Hawkins then sent word 
that 'the especial man' to arrange matters was Sir 
Walter, and leave was obtained for him to go down 
to Devonshire 'still in custody as the Queen's pris- 
oner in charge of Mr Blount." 

Some of the 'bags of seed pearls and rubies* 

65 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

brought home by the 'Madre de Dios' had found 
their way into the old cathedral city of Exeter, and 
the citizens had not been inclined to reveal to Sir 
Robert Cecil where they lay hid. *By my rough 
dealing,' wrote the Secretary, *I have made an 
impression with the mayor and the rest, and I have 
given orders to search every bag and mail coming 
from the West, for jewels, pearls and amber, and 
though I fear the birds be flown yet will I not doubt 
to save Her Majesty that which shall be worth my 
journey. Her Majesty's captive comes after me, 
but I have outrid him and will be at Dartmouth 
before him.' 

Sir Walter Raleigh, 'the Queen of England's poor 
captive,' as he called himself with 'a pensive air,' 
we may picture riding into the picturesque, hilly, 
small town on the green waters of the Dart with a 
splendid retinue. When he so willed none knew 
better than he how to excite the enthusiasm of poor 
seamen, though, as a rule, he held, like Coriolanus, 
the multitude and its opinion in utter scorn. As 
the sight of the mighty carrack met his eyes, tower- 
ing into the blue sky against a background of woods 
touched with the crimson, orange and brown of their 
early autumn glory, a light must have leapt up in 
them; and as the eager, sunburnt faces around him 
next caught his glance, ambitious dreams and hope 
would wake again within him, chasing away depres- 
sion and the bitterness of disappointment. These 
hardy seamen were so devoted he might count on 
them surely to follow him whithersoever he led them, 
over unsailed seas, to untrodden shores, by the 
crystal waters of the vast Orinoco, through virgin 

66 



The Madre de Dios 

forests to the mountains of glittering quartz and 
marble, in whose heart, according to Spanish legend, 
lay the magic region of El Dorado, Manoa (the 
golden city), where all the houses, and everything 
else, were of pure solid gold? If he found this foun- 
tain of wealth, richer than all the other countries 
of the world put together, if he added this to 
Elizabeths dominions, he must regain his old 
position in her affection and be forgiven by his 
sovereign for his 'brutish offence,' as Cecil termed 
his marriage. 

Delusive dream, vain vision, that as the years 
went on rose again and again to lure him on to his 
ruin and lead to that fall the story of which is one of 
the most tragic in the pages of history. 

Cecil watched that memorable scene on the quay 
at Dartmouth and then went into the inn to record 
it in his correspondence. 'I assure you, sir,' he 
wrote to Heneage, * his poor servants, to the number 
of 140 goodly men, and all the mariners came to him 
with such shouts of joy as I never saw a man more 
troubled to quiet them in my life. But his heart 
is broken, for he is very extreme pensive. . . . The 
meeting between him and Sir John Gilbert was with 
tears on Sir John's part. Whensoever he is saluted 
with congratulations on his liberty he doth answer, 
*'No, I am still the Queen of England's poor cap- 
tive." I wished him to conceal it, because here it 
doth diminish his credit, which I do vow to you be- 
fore God is greater amongst the mariners than I 
thought for I do grace him as much as I may, for 
I find him marvellously greedy to do anything to 
recover the conceit of his brutish offence.' 

67 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

The disputes with regard to the distribution of 
the booty from the ' Madre de Dios ' were many and 
not easily settled. In the end the Queen claimed 
and received the biggest share for herself, for avarice, 
that most disagreeable trait in Elizabeth's character, 
seemed to grow rather than decrease with her years. 
Raleigh, to whose spirit and enterprise the whole 
affair was due, did not come off very handsomely, 
but there could hardly be any talk of his returning 
to his prison after services from which her Majesty 
had reaped such a rich harvest. Instead, he took 
up his abode again at Durham House with Lady 
Raleigh, and concentrated his thoughts on better 
things than philandering. 



CHAPTER X: Sherborne and 
Guiana 

DURING the years that he was not wanted 
ab court, Sir Walter Raleigh took a more 
active part in Parliamentary debates than 
he had ever been at liberty to do before. He was a 
very remarkable speaker, and knew how to use ' his 
bold and plausible tongue' to good effect. No man 
of his day, it was said, was a greater master of elo- 
quence, and his speeches were full of close and clear 
argument and cool, discriminating judgment. It is 
curious that for all this he was no statesman. Eliza- 
beth, with her unerring insight into character and 
power of summing up the physical and mental assets 
of her servants, never summoned Raleigh to discuss 
with her the secrets of State or swore him a privy 
councillor. 

In the Parliament of 1592-3 he championed the 
Puritans, and opposed a Bill for the expulsion of a 
sect called Brownists. But he was in favour of ex- 
pelling ' alien retailers,' for it would appear that even 
as early as Elizabethan days there was an alien 
question. A large company of Dutch folks had 
settled in the city near St Martin-le-Grand, and 
carried on their trade of weaving, spinning and re- 
tailing of textiles, to the detriment, it was alleged, 
of the regular London dealers, 'inasmuch as three- 
score English retailers had been ruined by them since 
last Parliament.' Raleigh supported a Bill to make 
alien retail trading illegal, and in one of his most elo- 
quent speeches, he said, 'Whereas it is pretended 
that for strangers it is against charity, against hon- 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

our, against profit to expel them, in my opinion it is 
no matter of charity to reheve them. For first, such 
as fly hither do so forsaking their own King, and 
religion is no pretext for them, for we have no Dutch- 
men here but such as come from where the gospel is 
preached. Yet here they live disliking our Church. 
For honour: it is not honour to use strangers as we be 
used amongst strangers, and it is lightness to a com- 
monwealth — aye a baseness in a nation — to give 
liberty to another nation which we cannot receive 
again. And for profit: they are all of the house of 
Almoigne who pay nothing; aye eat out our profits 
and supplant our own nation. . . . Therefore I 
see no reason that such respect should be shown 
them, and to conclude, in the whole, no matter of 
honour, no matter of charity, no profit in relieving 
them.' 

The Bill for Disestablishing the Dutchmen was 
carried by a majority of 162 against 82. 

It was probably at this period, too, that Raleigh 
frequented *The Mermaid,' the inn where those 
famous convivial meetings of Ben Jonson, Shake- 
speare, Christopher Marlowe, and others took place. 
He was also the leading light of a society which en- 
couraged the discussion of such serious questions as 
life and death, the soul and the existence of God. 
It was dubbed by the ignorant ' Sir Walter Raleigh's 
School of Atheism.' 

*The truth is,' said a contemporary, *he was the 
first who ventured to tack about and sail aloof from 
the beaten track of the schools.' Elizabeth knew 
that her favourite, on account of his religious tolera- 
tion and breadth of views, had been branded as an 

70 



Sherborne and Guiana 

Atheist, ' though a known asserter of God and His 
providence,' and had *chid him,' saying it was 
* against her father's honour no less than against 
God.' 

His inquiring mind, no doubt, made Raleigh 
curious about all faiths and creeds, and it is related 
that he once passed a whole June night in disputa- 
tion with an arrested Jesuit. The fact, too, that he 
had enriched himself with lands belonging to the 
Church increased the popular suspicion of his not 
being orthodox. Before his disgrace he had ac- 
quired, by a piece of jobbery, the beautiful estate of 
Sherborne, in Dorsetshire, the lawful property of the 
Bishop of Sarum. Here, for the most part. Sir 
Walter and his lady lived for the next ten years; 
though they kept up a stately household at Durham 
House, and resided there in much magnificence when 
they visited London, Sherborne was their favourite 
and dearest home. On these confiscated estates 
Raleigh had once, when riding to London with his 
brother, fallen from his horse in the neighbourhood 
of Sherborne, and had been so charmed with the sur- 
rounding landscape that he had persuaded the 
Queen to grant him the lands which she could not do 
without taking them away from some one else; a 
trifling obstacle, however, and one easily removed 
for the sake of pleasing a gallant knight who, if he 
had fallen from his horse had not yet fallen from 
her favour. 

At Sherborne Raleigh had built himself a fair 
mansion, and laid out gardens extending over many 
acres, in emulation of the Cecils at Theobalds. In 
his years of retirement he spent many hours there 

71 



Sir TFalter Raleigh 

with the flowers and plants he loved, and among his 
books. In 1594 his little son ' Wat' was born to him. 
But there was no fear of Raleigh settling down 
contentedly as the discarded courtier and fallen 
favourite. His active mind was too full of vast 
dreams and many projects for self -aggrandisement 
and the good of his country. There were occupa- 
tions which often took him away from Sherborne 
and his building and planting there. He still dis- 
charged his duties as Lord Warden of the Stannaries 
on Dartmoor, and had plans for the development of 
his Lismore estates and the better government of 
Ireland. 

The richly perfumed yellow wallflowers that he 
imported from the Azores into Ireland, and a certain 
cherry, are still found where he first planted them 
by the Black water, and some cedars that he brought 
to Cork are also growing there to this day. Sir 
Robert Cecil, the swarthy, sinister-eyed secretary, 
and nephew of the old Lord Treasurer Burghley, 
whom Essex called the 'old fox,' kept up a regular 
correspondence with Raleigh, and was presumably 
his friend at court. He was the medium of repeated 
tentative efforts on Sir Walter's part to recapture 
the regard of his Queen, and establish himself again 
in her good graces. 

It was now that the idea of the first voyage to 
Guiana took definite shape. 

* Sir Walter having tasted,' wrote a contemporary, 
* abundantly of the Queen's love, finding it now 
begin to decline, resolved to undertake an expedition 
to sea, and engaged several of his friends of great 
quality to be concerned with him.' 

72 



Sherborne and Guiana 

This new venture was designed to be the most 
bold, brilKant and successful that ever was at- 
tempted, and to put anything conceived by others, 
and especially by my Lord of Essex, completely in 
the shade. 

The preliminary step was to dispatch in 1594 
a vessel commanded by an old captain of his, Jacob 
Whiddon, and his devoted servant, Kemys, to re- 
connoitre the Orinoco. Whiddon, a brave old sailor, 
with a simple, childlike nature, came home at the 
end of the year full of vague reports of the golden 
empire, but with no real information as to its where- 
abouts. He brought home, too, some red Indians, 
whose feathers and paint made a great impression as 
they flashed through the London streets. 

Raleigh, with his face set determinedly 'towards 
the sunset,' now came into residence at Durham 
House to keep himself in the public eye and to 
attract, by means of lavish display, men and funds 
for the enterprise. There was no sign of his being 
the ruined man as his enemies hoped. He wore his 
gorgeous clothes, his jewels and chains of pearls 
with the same consummate easy grace as of yore. 
He stood in the glory of his adventurous prime, 
a-thrill with unconquerable eager hopes and am- 
bition. His feet were not yet set on the dark, 
tortuous, downward paths of intrigue and reckless 
gambling which led on to his death. 

He had to encounter much opposition even from 
his gentle wife, who trembled at his going, dreading 
that this voyage in search of a golden mirage might 
break up for ever their happy domestic life. The 
letter which she wrote to Cecil, urging him to try and 

73 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

dissuade her husband from the undertaking, is a 
delightful example of a wife's anxiety and the quaint 
erratic spelling of the time. 

*Now Sur, for the rest,' it ends up, *I hope for my 
sake you will rather draw Sur Water towards the 
est, then heulp hyme forward toward the soonsett 
if ani respect to me or love to him be not forgotten. 
But everi month hath it's flower and everi season 
it's contentment, and you greate counselares are 
so full of new councils as you are steddi in nothing, 
but we' poore soules that hath bought sorrow at a 
high price desiar and can be pleased with the same 
misfortun wee hold, fearing alterations will but 
multiply misiri of which we have alredi felt sufficiant. 
. . . Therefore I humbelle beseech you rather 
stay than furder him. By which you shall bind me 
for ever.' 

It would have taken a stronger inducement than 
love of wife and child to hold Sir Walter back from 
those * soonsett' lands that Lady Raleigh was so 
unwilling he should visit. Tenderly devoted hus- 
band and father he might be, but he was not the man 
to make love the grand business of his life and 
domesticity his fetish. 

His imagination was too strongly fired with visions 
of the Empire of Guiana and his engrossing purpose 
of annexing it to his sovereign's domains. He 
obtained and studied all the Spanish books of travel 
and exploration dealing with the subject of Guiana, 
the mysterious region of reputed wealth beyond 
human conception. Thousands of voyagers, ex- 
pedition after expedition had started and sought in 
vain the fabulous city of glittering gold, on the 

74 



Sherborne and Guiana 

shores of its inland sea. They had fought pestilence 
and famine, thirst, weariness and heart-sickness, and 
then succumbed without catching even one distant 
gleam of the walls of El Dorado. Only a few 
stragglers came back with marvellous stories, which 
infected others with the fever — the lust for conquest 
and gold — and more explorers were sent to their 
doom. In 1594 Guiana was still awaiting its con- 
queror : for it was characteristic of Raleigh to think 
that it was reserved for him to set foot first on the 
virgin soil of that wondrous country, and to come 
back with such riches to throw into the lap of his 
Queen that her displeasure must be appeased once 
and for ever. 

The expedition which set out in February 1595, 
under Raleigh's personal command, was a strong one 
for he had been successful in enlisting public interest 
on its behalf, and able recruits. A ship was lent 
by the Lord High Admiral, money came from vari- 
ous sources, chiefly from the Cecils, and lUaiiy 
gentlemen volunteered their services, among them 
* my nephew John Gilbert and my cousin Grenville. ' 
Raleigh himself, as usual, risked his entire fortune 
recklessly in equipping most of the fleet at his own 
cost. 

A commission had been wrung from the Queen 
that gave him authority to * offend and enfeeble ' the 
King of Spain, to discover and subdue heathen 
lands not in possession of any Christian prince or 
inhabited by any Christian people, and to resist 
and expel any persons who should attempt to settle 
within 200 leagues of the place that he fixed upon for 
settlement. 

75 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

He arrived at Trinidad in March with only a 
small bark beside his own ship, and coasted about 
the southwest point of the island, but was unable to 
get in touch with the natives, who were hiding in 
fear of the Spaniards. Raleigh, in the description 
of his voyage, which he entitled 'The Discoverie of 
Guiana,' speaks of oysters growing here on the 
mangrove trees, and of the pitch lake, new and 
wonderful then, but now familiar enough to trav- 
ellers. His missing ships joined him at the Port of 
Spain, and from the shore a party of Spaniards made 
amicable signs, so that Captain Whiddon landed to 
parley with them. They were afterward invited to 
supper on Raleigh's ship, and given a lavish amount 
of wine, w^ ch the idea that when in their cups they 
grew merry they would reveal useful information 
about the new country. 

The Spanish guard of the governor of Trinidad, 
however, instead of being thus hospitably enter- 
tainea were slaughtered, and the governor, one 
Berreo, who was supposed to know more about 
El Dorado than anyone alive, was captured and 
carried off by Raleigh, to be used as an oracle on the 
expedition up the Orinoco. 

The exploring party left the ships at anchor and 
embarked in a galley, one barge, two wherries and a 
boat belonging to one of the ships, the 'Lion's 
Whelp.' They carried a hundred persons, and 
victuals for a month. 

* We were all driven to lie in the rain and weather 
in the open air, in the burning sun, and upon hard 
boards, and to dress our meat and to carry all 
manner of furniture, wherewith they were so pes- 

76 



Sherborne and Guiana 

tered and unsavoury that what with victuals being 
most fish, what with the wet clothes of so many men 
thrust together, and the heat of the sun, I will 
undertake to lay there was no prison in England 
that could be found more unsavoury and loathsome. ' 
So wrote Raleigh, who had been used to being 
' dieted and cared for in a sort far differing. ' Then 
follow graphic details of this bootless excursion up 
the vast main river. The Indians, all along the 
coast, we are told, possessed plates and crescents of 
gold, obtained by their trading with Guiana's 
inhabitants, and the English explorers, now keen to 
start on their quest, were heartened once more by 
the oft-told tales of men who daubed their naked 
bodies with gold dust in their carousals, and of 
wealth compared with which the treasures of Peru 
faded into insignificance. 

Berreo, the ex-governor of Trinidad, was 'stricken 
with a great sadness and melancholy ' when he under- 
stood that Raleigh intended taking possession of the 
mythical land of gold and annexing it to the Queen's 
dominions. He used every argument to dissuade 
him. *He assured the gentlemen of my company 
that it would be labour lost, and that they should 
suffer many miseries if they proceeded. ' The small 
rivers were full of shoals, he declared, and could not 
be entered, the Indians would not come near the 
English, but would run away from them, the journey 
was long, the winter at hand, the chiefs on the out- 
skirts of Guiana would permit no trade in gold 
with Christians, and so on. But Berreo was a wet 
blanket that could not damp Raleigh's ardour, and 
he determined to go on. 

77 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

How the unheeded warnings of the oracle proved 
more or less right; how food ran short, and the hot 
air bred faintness among the weary rowers; how they 
saw gorgeous tropical birds and flowers, and luscious 
fruits, with eyes too tired to wonder, and rowed 
their way in canoes through rivers so narrow and 
vegetation so thick that they had to cut branches 
down with their swords; how alligators and croco- 
diles swarmed and ate up Raleigh's negro-boy — all 
this and much more must be read in Raleigh's own 
vivid accounts of his adventures, for there is no 
space in which to do the story justice here. 

Though the explorers never came near sighting 
El Dorado, which had been their object, they had 
not been altogether unsuccessful when they returned 
home. They had navigated a network of rivers, 
had appeased and held friendly intercourse with the 
Indians, and discovered silver and other precious 
metals in abundance. They had paved the way for 
the future exploiting of a fair and fertile country, 
which, if not the golden land itself, was something 
very like it. 

Yet Raleigh, after his seven months' absence, 
came back to London almost empty-handed instead 
of loaded with wealth. And thus he failed to re- 
habilitate himself in the eyes of his enemies. They 
scouted the stories of Guiana and were sneeringly 
incredulous. *Some even went so far as to suggest 
that Raleigh had not been there at all, but had been 
hiding in Cornwall all the time that his faithful 
servants were fighting against thirst and famine and 
fever on the shores of the Orinoco. In these circum- 
stances it was not easy to raise the capital required 



78 



Sherborne and Guiana 

for a second expedition, especially as the Queen, 
still unmollified, refused to contribute a penny or a 
ship toward it. Nevertheless, before six months 
had passed. Captain Kemys was dispatched on 
another enterprise to Guiana. He was too crippled 
by want of money and supplies to do much beyond 
deepening the favourable impression the first visit 
of the English had made on the natives, and ascer- 
taining that the Spaniards were again attempting a 
settlement there. Kemys was wholly animated, 
like his master, by the colonizing spirit, and on his 
return he too wrote the history of his voyage, and 
made a fervent appeal to his countrymen not to 
allow Spanish aggrandisement but to forestall them 
in this work. 

'I can discern no competent impediment,' wrote 
Kemys, *but that with a sufficient number of men 
Her Majesty may and her successors enjoy this rich 
and great empire, and having once planted there, 
may for ever, with the favour of God, holde and keep 
it contra judcBos et Sentes, ' 

But for the present Raleigh was full of another 
great undertaking, which was to lead to more per- 
sonal glory than his first voyage to Guiana. 



79 



CHAPTER XI: The Sacking 
of Cadiz 

THE old apprehensions with regard to Spain's 
designs upon England were rife once more 
when Raleigh returned from Guiana. At 
this moment Calais was in possession of the Span- 
iards. The last attempts of Drake and Hawkins on 
Panama had failed, and the admirals were said to 
have died broken-hearted in consequence. Ireland 
was seething again with rebellion, and the Earl of 
Tyrone, the leader of the insurrection, was reported 
to be getting military aid from Philip and planning 
an attack on England. Again the old bugbears of 
Spanish supremacy at sea, and the building of fresh 
armadas in the ports of Spain, were giving rise to 
exaggerated fears and rumours. In retaliation, prep- 
arations were being made for an English expedition 
against Spain, of which Essex was to be the moving 
spirit. Raleigh laid down the pen which he had 
taken up to refute the slanders against him by writ- 
ing his * Discovery of the large, rich and beautiful 
Empire of Guiana, with a relation of the great and 
golden city of Manoa, ' and gladly, in this instance, 
joined hands with his rival. 

A powerful fleet was equipped at Plymouth, con- 
sisting of 150 vessels in the spring of 1596. Of these 
the Dutch supplied twenty-four; the Lord High 
Admiral, Howard of Effingham, was appointed 
supreme commander of the fleet; and Essex, General 
of the land forces. Thousands of gentlemen vol- 
unteered for the service, but it was harder to get 
ordinary sailors, and Raleigh, who had to levy men, 

80 



The Sacking of Cadiz 

wrote to Cecil, 'As fast as we press men one day, 
they come away another and say they will not serve.' 
For this reason he was late in joining the fleet at 
Plymouth, and his enemies tried to make capital out 
of the delay. 

*Sir Walter's slackness and " stay-by-the- way " 
is not thought to be upon sloth and negligence,' 
wrote one, * but upon pregnant design. . . . ' 

He arrived on the 21st of May, after having hunted 
renegade mariners *from ale-house to ale-house and 
dragged them through the mire. ' Before starting 
there were 'open jars' between Raleigh and Vere, 
who commanded the 'Rainbow.' 'Sir Walter 
Raleigh's carriage to my Lord of Essex,' some one 
reported, 'is with the cunningest respect and deepest 
humility that ever I saw.' 

His advice that England should not be constrained 
to act on the defensive was followed, and when, on 
June 2nd, the fleet at last set sail, it boldly made 
straight for Cadiz, and on the 26th anchored half a 
league from the city, which was the richest in Spain. 
The inhabitants were terror-struck, as they had no 
inkling of the coming of the English. The fortresses 
were out of repair, and the guns so old-fashioned as 
to be almost useless. But in the harbour there lay 
at anchor an array of formidable galleons, with their 
prows directed toward the coast — eleven frigates of 
war and forty cargo ships. 

Raleigh's ship was detached from the rest of the 
fleet to keep watch on the harbour and to prevent 
the escape of any Spanish vessel. In his absence 
a Council of War was held, and when he rejoined the 
rest he found that a resolution had been passed to 

81 



Sir TValter Raleigh 

attack the town first, and that Essex was in the act 
of putting soldiers into boats on a stormy sea. One 
barge had already sunk, and Raleigh dissuaded the 
Earl from the perilous and foolhardy idea of attack- 
ing the town before settling with the Spanish fleet in 
the harbour. His own plan of action was to batter 
the galleons before bombarding the town. He had 
to obtain the Lord High Admiral's authority to 
countermand the first order issued, and went to 
interview him on his ship. As he passed Essex, on 
his way from the successful interview, he shouted the 
news to Essex in Spanish, ^ Entramos! Entramos! 
We may enter!' and the Earl showed his delight 
and approval by flinging his plumed cap to the waves 
in a transport of boyish excitement. 

Raleigh led the van in the 'Warsprite,' with its 
crew of 290 men. He started well in advance of all 
the other ships, much to the disgust of their captains. 
At dawn the next day, which was Sunday, the great 
fight began, in which Raleigh covered himself with 
glory. The ' War sprite's' entry into the harbour was 
greeted by a thunderous cannonading from the forts 
and the galleys. But the only response she made 
was a contemptuous blare of trumpets to each dis- 
charge of the enemy's guns. Gaily she sailed on, 
still far ahead, though frantic efforts were made by 
jealous Sir Francis Vere and others to get their ships 
in front of him. Vere, indeed, covertly tied his 

* Rainbow' to the 'Warsprite,' but the ropes were 
soon cut by Raleigh's orders. Straight before him 
were the four biggest ships in the Spanish navy, 
foremost among them the gigantic 'St Philip' and 

* St Andrew. ' These last had overpowered Gren- 

82 



The Sacking of Cadiz 

ville's little 'Revenge' at the Azores four years 
earlier, and Raleigh, holding his gallant kinsman 
ever in affectionate remembrance, determined to be 
revenged for the 'Revenge,* or 'to second her with 
my own life. ' The ' St Philip ' was blown up by the 
despairing crew, and the 'St Andrew' captured and 
brought to England with the ' St Matthew. ' 

Raleigh, in his account, written afterward, says, 
' The spectacle was a very lamentable one, for many 
drowned themselves, many half-burnt leapt into 
the water, very many hanging by ropes' ends to 
the ship's side under water even to the lips; many 
swimming with grievous wounds, stricken under 
water, and put out of their pain, and withal so 
huge a fire, such tearing of the ordnance of the 
great St. Philip . . . indeed if any man had a 
desire to see hell itself it was there most lively 
figured. ' 

The rout of the Spaniards was complete, and 
Raleigh, with a splinter-torn leg, was the hero of the 
day. Though he alone had planned and carried out 
the victory, he generously gave honour to others 
where honour was due. In a letter to Cecil he 
wrote, after watching the sack of Cadiz from his 
litter: ' The Earl hath behaved himself . I protest 
to you by the living God, both valiantly and ad- 
visedly in the highest degree without pride, without 
cruelty and have gotten great honour and much 
love of all. ' 

When the city had capitulated, on June 20th, 
women and children having first been allowed to 
flee under the care of a Jesuit Father, Zensada, 
Raleigh was carried back to the 'Warsprite,' his 

83 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

thoughts now centred on the capture of the rich 
Indian fleet in the harbour of Puerto Real, the great 
prize which he hoped to lay at the feet of his Queen, 
and so to remove the last vestige of her resentment. 
However, in this he was doomed to failure. While 
disputing about a ransom which the merchants of 
Seville offered for the fleet, the English lost their 
booty. Medina Sidonia, the same old admiral who 
had proved himself anything but a competent com- 
mander in 1588, became, on this occasion, energetic 
and decisive in his despair, and ordered all the 
Spanish treasure-ships to be burnt, and that night 
galleons, frigates, argosies and emigrant ships blazed 
to the sky. 

The division of the spoils of Cadiz caused much 
ill-feeling and jealousy. R-aleigh declared that he 
came off with nothing but a lame leg and pain and 
anguish, yet though he got nothing from the two 
galleons which he brought home, he seems to have 
been apportioned £1769 to Vere's £3628, a disparity 
that increased the bitterness between them. Essex 
was all for giving the greater share of the plunder to 
the soldiers in preference to the sailors, for he had 
no love for the sea and its calling. 

There was also difference of opinion among the 
leaders with regard to the holding of the conquered 
city. Finally it was agreed that the best policy 
was to abandon it, and on the 5th of August the men 
re-embarked and left Cadiz, a pile of ruins. 

Thus ended the memorable action ' in which, ' says 
an eyewitness, *the King of Spain never received 
so great an overthrow, and so great indignity at 
our hands, for our attempt was at his home, in his 

84 



The Sacking of Cadiz 

port that he thought as safe as his chamber, where 
we took and destroyed his ships of war, burned 
and consumed the wealth of his merchants, sacked 
his city, ransomed his subjects and entered the 
country without impeachment. ' 

In his History of the World, Raleigh describes 
Cadiz as one of the three keys of the Spanish Empire 
bequeathed by Charles V to Philip. 

'We stayed not to pick any lock,' he says, 'but 
brake open the doors and, having rifled all, threw 
the key into the fire.' 

It is undoubted that the galloping decline of Spain 
dates from the day Raleigh in the * War sprite' 
marshalled the way into Cadiz Harbour with a 
fanfare of trunipets. Drake, when he had sailed 
up to Cadiz in 1587, had merely ' singed the King of 
Spain's beard,' and it was only the audacity of the 
action which had amazed and infuriated his Majesty. 
There had been no talk of landing, and it was simply 
regarded as an astounding naval coup de main. 
But this sacking of Cadiz in 1596, without a check, 
the destruction of the finest ships of Spain and of 
forty laden Indian carracks, was a serious affair, 
calculated to bring the aged and embittered Spanish 
monarch to his grave. It wrung from even Raleigh's 
enemies admiration and warm words of praise. 

*Sir W. Raleigh did in my judgement no man bet- 
ter,' testified Sir Arthur Standen, a follower of 
Essex. *I never knew that gentleman till this 
time, there are in him excellent things besides his 
valour.' 

So friends and enemies joined their voices in 
appreciation of Raleigh's heroic achievement. The 

85 



Sir JVa/ter Raleigh 

Queen alone still held aloof, though she was rapidly 
softening toward her fallen favourite. She was 
indignant that the spoils of the expedition were not 
greater, and went so far as to abuse her trusted 
minister, Burghley, for pleading the right of Essex 
to reap profits from his own prisoners. Elizabeth's 
thwarted avarice blinded her to the distinguished 
services which had been rendered her and the coun- 
try at Cadiz. At first she received Essex with open 
arms, but the question of booty soon led to quarrels 
between them, and then she turned once more to 
Raleigh and received him graciously in May 1597, 
just nine months after his return from Spain. 
Again he donned his splendid silver armour and, as 
Captain of the Guard, rode out on a June evening 
at her Majesty's side, engaged in confidential con- 
verse as of old. 

His four years' banishment from court were over, 
and the estrangement as if it had never been. 



86 



CHAPTER XII: The Island 
Voyage 

AFTER his restoration to favour, Raleigh's 
friendship with Robert Cecil, the Secretary 
of State, seemed to increase rapidly. Cecil's 
little son was sent to Sherborne to be the playmate 
of young Walter Raleigh and to share his studies. 
On the death of Cecil's wife, in 1597, Sir Walter 
wrote his friend a very beautiful letter of tender 
sympathy, signing himself, * Yours ever beyond the 
power of words to utter, — W. Raleigh.' 

Curiously enough, Essex, who had furiously re- 
sented Cecil being appointed Secretary of State 
in preference to Sir Thomas Bodley, whom he had 
recommended for the post to the Queen, was, at this 
time, on excellent terms with both Cecil and Raleigh. 
The three were intimate together. 'Often goes 
the Earl,' wrote a contemporary, 'to Sir Robert 
Cecil's house, very private where they all meet,' 
and, later, the same writer asserted, 'none but Cecil 
and Raleigh enjoy the Earl of Essex, they carry him 
away, as they list.' 

Robert Cecil, his father's own son, a courtier from 
the cradle, to whom was attributed one of the 'rarest 
and most excellent wits in England,' was pledged 
to that policy of moderation which for forty years 
had stood Elizabeth in such good stead. Essex, 
on the other hand, was perpetually advocating a 
policy of aggression toward Spain, and his tur- 
bulence often alarmed and angered the Queen. 
What motive Cecil had now in turning round and 
stirring up Essex in his belligerent schemes, no one 

87 



Sir TValter Raleigh 

could guess. One thing was certain. It was not 
done for love of the warlike Earl or to his ultimate 
advantage. Probably the secretary's object in en- 
couraging Essex to embark on fresh and daring 
adventures, which involved her Majesty in heavy 
expenditure and brought her small gain, was in 
some dark, mysterious way for the sole benefit of 
Robert Cecil. 

The friendly relations between Raleigh and Essex 
after the victory of Cadiz were sustained by tidings 
coming to England of Spain's meditated revenge. 
Philip, it was said, had got another fleet ready to 
sail at Ferrol. The two temporarily reconciled 
rivals were all eagerness to strike another blow 
against Spain in her own dominions. No one knew 
better than Cecil that the talk of an avenging Span- 
ish Armada was merely braggadocio; that Philip was 
powerless to do anything more formidable than 
supply the Irish with totally inadequate help. 
Everything was in hopeless confusion at Ferrol and 
Corunna. The Spaniards were bankrupt, without 
money, men or armaments. There was no real 
danger to England now from the impotent King of 
Spain, but rumour and public opinion said other- 
wise. So a fleet of 150 sailing vessels, with 5000 
soldiers on board, sailed from Plymouth on the 
19th of July. The command was given to Es- 
sex, and Raleigh was his vice-admiral. Tempestu- 
ous weather at the outset compelled the ships 
to put back into harbour, to the desperation of 
Essex. 

''I do constantly believe,' wrote Raleigh to Cecil, 
that either my Lord General will wrestle with the 



The Island Voyage 

seas to his peril or if constrained to come back will 
be found utterly heart-broken.' 

Provisions ran short and fever broke out among 
the crews. Essex and Raleigh rode post-haste back 
to London, and the former implored the Queen to 
allow him to put to sea again directly his ships were 
in order and the v/ind in the right quarter. The 
season was so advanced, and the enemy said to be 
preparing, that the Queen objected to her ships and 
men being exposed to such risks as the expedition 
would now entail. 

After much persuasion she gave her consent to 
fire-ships being sent into the harbour of Ferrol to 
burn the Spanish fleet, but would permit no en- 
gagement on land. The troops were to be left be- 
hind, and Essex was made to promise that he would 
take no personal part in the operations. The dan- 
gerous business was to be entrusted to Raleigh. 

When at last the fleet set sail once more, on August 
17th, without the troops, it was caught in another 
great storm in the Bay of Biscay. Raleigh's ship, 
the 'Warsprite,' broke her main yard-arm and was 
separated from the rest of the fleet. He only man- 
aged to come up with it again when the islands were 
reached, and his enemies were not slow to represent 
to Essex that he had wilfully deserted, and the im- 
pulsive Earl sent home a complaint forthwith of 
Raleigh's conduct. To do him justice, he afterward 
apologized frankly, and confessed to Raleigh that 
he had been 'taxed secretly with strange reports' 
arising *from the cankered and scandalous disposi- 
tion of those who made them.' He showed Raleigh 
much cordiality when the fleet was reunited off 

89 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

Flores, and sought his society. But all too soon 
his good humour evaporated, the next escapade of 
his rear-admiral putting him in high dudgeon. 

It had been agreed that the two were to make a 
joint attack on the Island of Fayall. Raleigh, 
however, on arriving there, could see nothing of 
Essex, and finding himself first at the rendezvous, 
and being fired on by soldiers who lined the beach 
to dispute his landing, he was naturally impatient 
to begin operations. For four days he waited, 
restraining the eagerness of his men and watching 
Fay all's preparations for defence, and being dared 
by the enemy to come on and attack, till at last 
he could contain himself no longer. He pushed 
forward to the shore, followed by 260 men, leaving 
the Dutch contingent behind to receive their orders 
from the Commander-in-Chief. 

As they came to the beach they were fired on, 
so hotly that the men flinched at landing. Raleigh 
rebuked them with 'reproachful words,' and had his 
own boat rowed on to the rocky beach. Breast-high 
in the surf he led the attack on the trenches, clamber- 
ing over rocks, with no armour but his gorget and 
helmet. Panic-stricken, the defenders fled, throw- 
ing away their weapons. Some of Raleigh's men 
were killed, but he now drew reinforcements from 
the ships and enlisted the services of the Dutch. 
He led the party full in face of the fort, which gave 
them a warm reception, but its defenders soon aban- 
doned it for another perched on a high craggy hill. 
Raleigh found nearly all his men unwilling to recon- 
noitre this eminence, and in disgust undertook to do 
it himself, alone and unaided. His cousin, Sir 

90 






'BREAST-HIGH IN THE SUUF UK LED THE ATTACK'" 

— Page 90 



The Island Voyage 

Arthur Gorges, and ten of his personal friends, 
followed him. Two lost their lives. Gorges was 
wounded in the leg, and Raleigh's clothes were 
pierced with bullets. *They plied us so fast with 
small shot/ recorded Gorges, ' that I well remember 
he wished me to put off a large red scarf which I then 
wore, being, as he said, a very fair mark for them. 
But I not being willing to do the Spaniards so much 
honour, though I could have wished it had not been 
on, answered the rear-admiral again that his white 
scarf was as eminent as my red, and therefore I 
would now follow his example.' 

Before a systematic attack on the fort could be 
begun it was deserted by the garrison, and the whole 
island was in Raleigh's possession. Essex arrived 
the next day with his fleet, and found the work 
done. 

The Lord General was furious at having had no 
hand in the glorious achievement of taking Fayall. 
Some of his * cankered and scandalous' advisers 
went so far as to talk of a court martial, and of 
Raleigh deserving to lose his head. He was charged 
with 'a breach of order and the articles' in landing 
on the island in the absence of his superior in com- 
mand. Raleigh defended himself with dignity and 
coolness. He took all the blame on himself and 
exonerated his companions. Essex calmed down 
sufficiently to go ashore to visit Raleigh in his 
lodgings. Sir Walter invited the Earl to sup with 
him, and took care to explain that should the invita- 
tion be accepted he claimed no privilege or favour 
if he wished to call him to further account. Sir 
Christopher Blount, who was in attendance on 

91 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

Essex, had the effrontery to reply for him that 
he thought ' my lord would not sup at all.' Where- 
upon Raleigh crushingly retorted to the effect that 
as for Sir Christopher's own appetite he might 
(when he was invited) disable it at his own pleasure. 
But if the Earl would stay he would be glad of his 
company.' 

While these events tv^|^assing at the Azores, 
the Spaniards had succeeoM in getting together 
an Armada of a sort and had sailed for Ireland, 
only to be driven back by a storm to the coast of 
Spain. The English fleet got home without further 
adventure beyond the capture of three caracks from 
Brazil. Essex was received by his sovereign at first 
with an outburst of fury, but the fascination of his 
presence soon pacified her again, though the favour- 
ite recognized to his chagrin that during his absence 
he had lost much of his influence at court. Lord 
Howard of Efl&ngham had been created Earl of 
Nottingham in recognition of his services at Cadiz, 
and so took precedence of the Commander-in-Chief 
by virtue of his new patent combined with his rank 
as Lord High Admiral. 

The young Earl was so nettled at this that he 
became more overbearing and arrogant than ever. 
He challenged the Lord Admiral to fight, insulted 
his sons and feigned illness to deprive the Queen of 
his society. It was Raleigh who acted the part of 
peacemaker, and it was at his instigation that 
Essex was made Earl Marshal of England, and, after 
sulking in his tent, returned to court. He was in a 
mood to quarrel with anyone, and the box on the 
ear which the exasperated Queen administered to 

92 



The Island Voyage 

him one day when his rudeness had provoked her 
beyond endurance was the beginning of the end. 
Essex's debacle was not far off. His petty jealousy 
of Raleigh was displayed at this time in what was 
called his 'Feather Triumph.' Having heard that 
Raleigh was to appear at a tourney at Whitehall on 
the Queen's birthday, with his men flaunting orange- 
tawny plumes in their caps and wearing orange- 
tawny favours, Essex provided himself and his vast 
train with feathers and favours exactly similar in 
colour ' to brave the knight, or to confound his suite 
with his own.' 

Elizabeth had welcomed Raleigh after his exploits 
at Fay all with every mark of approval, and the 
crowd who made an idol of Essex and had never 
cared for Raleigh hated him more than ever for 
having, as it were, ousted the popular Earl from his 
position as pet of the Queen. Still suffering from 
the splinter wound in his leg, Sir Walter was glad 
to get away to nurse it for a time at Bath. He then 
went to his dear home at Sherborne for a long period 
of peace and rest, and temporarily, at any rate, the 
antagonism between the two great rivals was in 
abeyance. 



93 



CHAPTER XIII: Fall of 
Essex 

THE dark tragedy of the once gay young 
favourite's fate fills the stage from 1598 to 
1601, when one February day Essex paid the 
penalty for his headstrong rashness and folly by death 
on the scaffold. From his busy life, Raleigh (now 
Governor of Jersey in addition to his other offices) 
snatched time to play a minor though sinister part in 
the events which led up to the execution of his rival. 

The success of Tyrone's rebellion made the con- 
dition of Ireland the burning question of the day. 
In consideration of the grave reverses the English 
intruders had suffered at the hands of the rebels, 
and the relations of intimacy existing between them 
and Spain, vigorous and coercive measures were said 
to be absolutely necessary. It was first proposed 
that Raleigh himself should go to Ireland as Lord 
Deputy to suppress discontent with an iron hand, 
but he ' little liked ' the suggestion, and finally the su- 
preme command of Irish affairs was offered to Essex. 

Naturally the Earl was unwilling to leave the field 
of court intrigues clear for the manoeuvres of Raleigh 
and Cecil, yet his restlessness and desire to make 
a new bid for fame prompted him to accept the 
position of power, and in April 1599 he went to take 
up his rule in Ireland. Almost directly he seems to 
have wildly regretted the step he had taken. 

*From a mind delighting in sorrow,' he wrote to 
the Queen, *from spirits wasted with passion, from 
a heart torn in pieces with care and travail — what 
service can your Majesty expect, since any past 
service deserves no more than banishment and pro- 

94 



Fall of Essex 



scription to the cursedest of islands?' And later he 
complained, *From England I receive nothing but 
discomforts and soul's wounds . . .' and he goes 
on to impute to Cecil, Raleigh and Raleigh's new 
friend, Cobham, a wish (that they never harboured) 
that Tyrone should triumph. It was Essex himself, 
who after six months' ineffectual attempt at crushing 
the rebellion, made a truce with the Irish leader; 
and Sir Christopher Blount, who lost his head for 
being concerned in Essex's conspiracy, gave evidence 
at his trial of Essex having been only dissuaded by 
himself from raising the standard of revolt in Ireland 
at the head of 4000 soldiers of the Queen. After 
appointing the Earl of Southampton, his own par- 
ticular friend, to an important command, in defiance 
of the Queen's express wishes, he took the still more 
fatal step of suddenly, without her leave, rushing 
over to England and arriving at her palace of Non- 
such in a dusty, travel-stained condition. 

He forced his way into her chamber, and was 
guilty of the cardinal crime of finding the Queen in a 
not prearranged deshabille. Here comes in the 
story (disallowed, like the story of Raleigh spreading 
the cloak, by conscientious historians) of false 
tresses lying about on the dressing-table and the 
Earl's unconcealed contempt thereof. Such blun- 
dering disobedience was never to be pardoned. 
That night Essex was practically arrested and his 
ruin assured. There were two factions at court, one 
in support of the Earl, and the other (in whose ranks 
was Raleigh) eager to hurry him to his doom. The 
people in London and the provinces were on the side 
of the popular young hero whose many engaging quali- 

95 



Sir JValter Raleigh 

ties had won their hearts fromthe first. And officers 
who had fought under him in Ireland, came over in 
large numbers to stand by him in his time of trial. 

His personal friends — Mount joy, Southampton 
and Blount, the Earl of Worcester and Rutland- 
were ready to give their lives for him. He posed in 
the eyes of the populace as the victim of Raleigh 
and his party's jealousy and malicious spite, but he 
attributed none of his misfortunes to his own folly. 
There is no doubt that Raleigh had every reason to 
wish Essex out of the way. He was plotting treason 
against the State (having been once more released), 
and his triumph would have involved Raleigh's ruin. 
It is not surprising, therefore, that he should have 
expressed himself as strongly as he did in the follow- 
ing letter to the Queen's secretary: 

*I am not wise enough to give you advice; but 
if you take it for good council to relent towards this 
tyrant, you will repent it when it shall be too late. 
His malice is fixed and will not evaporate by any of 
your mild courses. For he will ascribe the altera- 
tion to Her Majesty's pusillanimity and not to your 
good nature; knowing that you work but upon her 
humour and not out of any love towards him. The 
less you make him, the less he shall be able to harm 
you and yours. And unless Her Majesty's face 
favour him, he will again decline to a common per- 
son. . . . Look to the present and you do wisely. 
His son shall be the youngest Earl of England but 
one, and if his father be kept down well, Cecil shall 
be able to keep as many men at his heels as he and 
more too. . . . But if the father continue he will 
be able to break the branches and pull up the tree 

96 



Fall of Essex 

root and all. Lose not your advantage; If you do 
I read your destiny. — Yours to the end. — W. R.' 

But though his protesting against lenif^ncy toward 
Essex may be natural, Raleigh's admirers would like 
to think of him as having displayed more generosity 
to an enemy. During the Fay all dispute, when 
Essex was urged by his advisers to bring Raleigh 
before a court martial for insubordination, the Earl 
replied, chivalrously, *If he had been my friend, I 
would have done so. ' He thus showed that he rec- 
ognized a code of honour in dealing with enemies 
more stringent than that demanded by the claims 
of friendship. Not so Raleigh, who now could not 
conceal his eagerness to hasten the undoing of his 
popular rival. Yet, before condemning him, we must 
consider the circumstances, and admit that there was 
ample cause for his apparently vindictive attitude. 

Essex's recovery of power and position, as has 
been said before, would mean ruin, if not death, 
to Raleigh and his friends. 

In his letters to Elizabeth from Ireland he had 
abused them in no measured language. He had 
also been writing to the future king of England, 
James of Scotland, tales of Raleigh and Cobham 
favouring the aspirations of Philip's daughter, the 
Infanta of Spain, to Elizabeth's throne, an altogether 
groundless charge. In every way he could, Essex 
had striven to damage the reputation of Raleigh, 
Cecil and Cobham, and make mischief at court. 
His hostility was bitter and implacable toward them, 
and they had everything to fear from any renewal 
of his ascendancy over the Queen. 

And it was not a case of Raleigh kicking a man 

97 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

when he was down. Essex, even if disgraced, had a 
powerful following, and was the favourite of the mob 
who, however, were to desert him at the crucial 
moment of insurrection. 

On the 7th of February the Earl's friends met at 
Essex House, where, after pretending to be ill in the 
country to excite the pity of the Queen, he had 
returned and given sumptuous entertainments to 
his followers. He had been winning over the 
Puritans to his side by denunciations of Spain and 
the Catholics, and now the hour seemed ripe for 
carrying out his absurd plot of seizing Whitehall 
and compelling the Queen to dismiss Raleigh, Cecil 
and the rest of her advisers, and summon Parliament 
and settle the vexed question of the succession once 
for all. Spies got wind of the plan, and the Palace 
guards were doubled. The following Sunday morn- 
ing 300 gentlemen were to ride through the city 
stirring up the citizens by loudly proclaiming the 
Earl's grievances and what he had suffered from 
Raleigh, about whom the public was always ready 
to credit any calumny. Just before they started, 
Raleigh sent a message to Sir Ferdinand Gorges, one 
of the conspirators and a cousin of his own, asking 
him to come and see him at Durham House. Gorges 
was given leave by Essex to go, on condition that, 
instead of entering the house, he was interviewed by 
the Captain of the Guard on the river. Raleigh 
rowed out to meet Gorges, alone in his boat, as usual 
careless of his own safety. He advised his cousin 
to escape to Plymouth as a warrant was out for his 
arrest. Gorges said it was too late, for he had com- 
mitted himself with 2000 ' other gentlemen who had 

98 



Fall of Essex 

resolved that day to live or die free men. ' Another 
of the conspirators, Sir Christopher Blount, had 
advised Gorges to take advantage of the interview 
b}^ killing Raleigh. Gorges refused, but Blount, 
watching, with four armed men, from a little distance 
what passed on the river, sent musket shots at 
Raleigh's retreating figure as he rowed back to 
Durham House, after severely admonishing Gorges 
and reminding him of his duty of allegiance. 

The desperate Earl, a little later, rode beyond 
Temple Bar with his train of 200 gentlemen, calling 
out that Raleigh had laid an ambuscade for him 
and his life was in jeopardy. The citizens stopped 
on their way to church and stared at him, but not 
one showed any inclination to do more than listen. 
Much as they might have sympathized with a 
brilliant, generous young favourite in disgrace, they 
were not now disposed to take up arms against the 
State on his behalf for the sake of a private griev- 
ance. Essex saw that he had made a false move 
when a voice in the crowd murmured ' Treason, ' and 
he turned his horse's head back in the direction of 
the river, flung himself into a boat and rowed to 
Essex House. He found it besieged, and threw up 
the game. Ten days afterward he was tried and 
condemned for high treason. On Ash Wednesday 
Essex was executed at the Tower, Raleigh being 
present on duty as Captain of the Guard, as he had 
been in the same capacity present at the trial. 

Thinking that the doomed man might wish to 
speak with him and ask his forgiveness, Raleigh took 
up a position near the scaffold. This was misinter- 
preted by the mob, who hated and detested Raleigh 

99 



Sir JValter Raleigh 

as much as it still worshipped the fallen idol, as a 
wish to exult over the fate of his enemy. When 
Raleigh heard the murmurings of the crowd to this 
effect, he retired to a distant window of the armoury 
where he witnessed the last terrible scene, with tears 
pouring down his cheeks. 

Years and years afterward, when he too stood 
on the scaffold to meet the same end, Raleigh refuted 
the slander that he had gloated over the death of 
Essex. *True it was,' he said, *that I was of the 
contrary faction, but I bare him no ill affection, and 
always believed it had been better for me if his life 
had been preserved, for after his fall I got the hatred 
of those who wished me well before, and those who 
set me against him, set themselves afterwards 
against me and were my greatest enemies. ' 

When the tragedy was over, observers have 
recorded how the Captain of the Guard rowed home 
with a very heavy and sorrowful countenance. He 
had lost his most formidable antagonist, but the 
Queen's sun was setting, and he who was to come 
after her, James VI of Scotland, was already being 
poisoned against Raleigh in the secret correspond- 
ence of his false friend, the double-faced Cecil. The 
secretary was no more able to tolerate a rival in the 
shape of a friend than he was in that of a declared 
enemy like Essex. Maybe that Raleigh had some pre- 
sentiments for the future that Ash Wednesday as he 
rowed over the shining waters of the Thames to Dur- 
ham House, and it was not only the recollection of 
what he had just seen which brought the cloud of sad- 
ness to his face, but dim forebodings of other scenes 
of tragedy in which he was to play the leading part. 

100 



CHAPTER XIV: Queen 
Elizabeth^ s Last Days 

THE aged Queen was never the same after 
the head of her favourite had rolled from 
the block. Yet she affected at first a 
strange and, to our ideas, outrageous callousness to 
hide her real feelings of grief. When the news was 
oflficially announced that the tragedy was over, the 
Queen, who was playing on the virginals, continued 
her performance as if nothing had happened. 
Raleigh was present, and the Earl of Oxford, giving 
him a significant glance, remarked, referring to the 
action of her Majesty's fingers on the keys of the 
instrument, 'When Jacks start up, then heads go 
down.' Every one understood the bitter point of 
this allusion. 

Elizabeth ordered a declaration of Essex's treason- 
able misdeeds to be published, and a sermon, in 
which he was denounced, to be preached ab St Paul's 
Cross. The people of London resented both. They 
could not forgive the Queen, and her appearance in 
public was in these days greeted with silence instead 
of with the old shouts of loyal applause. 

The loss of Essex left Sir Robert Cecil without a 
rival in the Court or Cabinet, and he soon exercised 
his power to the utmost. Essex had confessed to 
carrying on a secret correspondence with the King 
of Scots, and had named the agent he had used. 
The cunning Cecil lost no time in making use of the 
same tools to serve his own ends. Those who were 
left of the Essex faction, now without a leader, were 
ready to sell themselves to the highest bidder. Thus 

101 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

the secretary was able to establish a complete under- 
standing with King James from which Raleigh, even 
if he had desired to be in it, was shut out. While 
Cecil was providing for his future, Raleigh, on the 
contrary, appeared to be curiously indifferent to the 
inevitable change that was coming, conscious that 
the favour of his sovereign, whose life was gradually 
ebbing away, was all he had to cling to. Well 
knowing how unpopular he was both at court and 
in the country, he was reluctant in making advances 
to the future sovereign. Not that he was content 
with things as they were, for he wrote at this time to 
Elizabeth in the following exaggerated tone of 
injury: 

* Your Majesty having left me, 1 am left all alone 
in the world and am sorry that I ever was at all. 
What I have done is out of zeal and love and not by 
any encouragement, for I am forgotten in all rights 
and in all affairs and mine enemies have their will 
and desire over me. ' 

The old grievance was rankling in Raleigh's bosom 
as he wrote this, the grievance that he had never 
been made one of her Majesty's privy councillors 
or offered a more grandiloquent title than that of 
plain knight. 

He seems to have had no suspicion of the real 
danger he stood in, from the machinations and 
intrigues of the man with whom he believed he was 
united in the bonds of true friendship. There were 
many others concerned in plotting his ruin, and to 
follow all the ramifications of the conspiracy against 
him would fill a volume. Suffice it to say that it was 
Cecil, aided by the infamous Lord Henry Howard 

102 



Queen Elizabeth V Last Days 

(afterward the murderer of Sir Thomas Overbury), 
who worked most assiduously against him, and was 
the chief instrument in discrediting him with King 
James. 

Now that her days were numbered the Queen 
showed a greater aversion than ever to discussing 
the subject of the succession to her throne. But 
statesmen were bound to consider it, and Cecil him- 
self would have favoured the claims of the beautiful 
and fascinating Arabella Stuart had she not rejected 
his proposal to marry her and so given him cause for 
personal pique. Arabella's right was equal to that 
of James, for she was the great-grand-daughter of 
Margaret Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII and a 
cousin of James. The unfortunate Queen of Scots 
had disinherited her son James in her will, and 
bequeathed her rights to the English Crown to Philip 
of Spain, Elizabeth's brother-in-law and old enemy, 
whose claim was also backed by his descent from 
Philippa Plantagenet, a daughter of John of Gaunt. 
But the old king, Philip II, was now dead, and the 
new King (Philip III) was far too embarrassed with 
domestic affairs and financial bankruptcy to support 
materially the^Infanta's pretensions. She and her 
husband were getting old and had no children, 
and really had no desire to succeed to the 
English throne; it was as much as they could 
do to keep the Netherlands. Spanish diplomacy 
therefore decided on dropping the Infanta's claim, 
and the English Catholics were informed that the 
King of Spain would support any candidate they 
might select. 

The decision was come to in March 1603, and the 

103 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

claimant chosen was Arabella Stuart, who, after, 
when a child of twelve, being feted by Elizabeth as 
her probable successor, was under a cloud and spend- 
ing the last days of the Queen's reign in prison. If 
Cecil had not decided to embark on intrigues in 
favour of James, for the reason given, it is quite 
possible that the Lady Arabella might have peace- 
fully ascended the throne. There would have been 
no disloyalty on the part of Raleigh if he had worked 
for this end, as the question of the succession was an 
open one. The idea was to approach Elizabeth's 
ministers and to enlist them on behalf of the new 
and disinterested Spanish plan to exclude the Scot, 
who was regarded by the majority of Englishmen 
as a foreigner, and undoubtedly communications 
to this effect may have passed between Raleigh and 
Cobham and the envoy Aremberg. 

Meanwhile Cecil carried on his game of intrigue 
merrily in league with Lord Henry Howard, who 
played the basest part of all in the dark drama of 
betrayal. 

Cecil could write thus of the man who had been 
his valued friend: 

'I do prof ess, before Him thatknoweth and search- 
eth all men's hearts, that if I did not some times cast 
a stone into the mouth of these gaping crabs 
[Cobham and Raleigh] when they are in the prodigal 
humour of discourses they would not stick to confess 
daily how contrary it is to their nature to resolve to 
be under your sovereignty though they confess 
(Raleigh especially) that rehus sic stantibus natural 
policy forceth him to keep on foot such a trade 
against the great day of mart . . . ' and so on. 

104 



Queen Elizabeth^ s Last Days 

King James is begged not to believe anything tliat 
Raleigh says on any account whatever. Cecil then 
adds, 'I will leave the best and wor^t of him to 3 
[the cipher in the secret correspondence standing 
for Lord Henry Howard] in whose discretion and 
affection you may sleep serenely . ' 

This Howard, who had been a spy in the pay of 
Spain, was possessed by the most virulent hatred of 
Raleigh and Cobham and their supposed friend, 
Northumberland. *Hell cannot afford such a like 
triplicity, ' is how he spoke of the three. When, in 
1601, Raleigh had received James's emissary, the 
Duke of Lennox, and held friendly conferences with 
him at Durham House, Howard worked himself up 
into a frenzy, and wrote to the Scotch court that 
Lennox was raising a party against Cecil, repeating 
that Raleigh, and Cobham were secretly opposed to 
his succession. Not content with this, he tried to 
work a dastardly scheme by which the old Queen, 
sickening for her last illness, was to be alienated 
from Raleigh and her mind poisoned against Cob- 
ham and Northumberland. *Her Majesty must 
know, ' he wrote to Cecil, ' the rage of their discontent 
for want of being called to that height which they 
affect, and be made to taste the peril that grows out 
of discontented minds. . . . She must know that 
the blame is only laid on her. . . . She must be 
taught to see the peril that grows unto princes by 
protecting, countenancing or entertaining persons 
odious to the multitude.' It must be impressed on 
the Queen by her secretary that'Rawlie who in pride 
exceedeth all men alive, finds no vent for paradoxes 
outside a council board . . . ' that his wife is ' as 

105 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

furious as Proserpine with failing of that restitution 
at Court, which flatterie had moved her to expect. ' 
Then follow all sorts of wicked suggestions for en- 
tangling Raleigh and Cobham by implicating them 
in plots which did not exist. 

Yet all this time Raleigh's generous confidence in 
the friend who was serving him in this underhand 
manner seems to have remained unshaken, for in 
writing to Cecil on business in 1602 he ends his letter 
with the following touching expression of good 
faith : 

' If we cannot have what we would, methinks it is 
a great bond to find a friend who will strain himself 
in his friend's cause in whatsoever as this world 
f areth. ' 

We have seen how Cecil was 'straining himself 
in Sir Walter's cause! 

The passing of Elizabeth's great spirit was 
attended by many painful and affecting incidents, 
For long the Queen obstinately refused to go to bed 
and crouched on the floor of the Presence Chamber 
among her cushions. She could not be persuaded 
to take either medicine or spiritual comfort. Her 
last hours were troubled by terrors and horrid 
visions. At times she would plunge her dagger 
through the arras at an imaginary foe, or behold the 
phantom of her own wasted form pass before her 
glazing eyes. 

At last the end came at Richmond Palace on 
March 24th, 1603. Raleigh was not present at the 
death of the Queen. Her true and loyal knight- 
errant for so many years, the last of those gallant 
and brilliant figures that had added to the lustre of 

106 



Queen Elizabeth V Last Days 

her court and made it the admiration of the world, 
he held aloof, and the dying Queen can have ex- 
pressed no wish to see him or he certainly would 
have come and not have allowed his duties in Jersey 
or the West Country to detain him. Thus even 
before the old Queen breathed her last, disgrace had 
descended on Raleigh, and Cecil and Lord Henry 
Howard's deep-laid schemes were brought to a 
triumphant issue. 

The new sovereign came to the throne with an 
almost insane prejudice against him. Raleigh's day 
was over, and ruin stared him in the face. There 
was no one to stand up for him outside Cornwall 
and Devon where he was ever beloved. 



107 



CHAPTER XV: Plots and 
Conspiracies 

A MEETING was held at Whitehall, directly 
after the Queen had passed away, to pro- 
claim the accession of James Stuart to the 
throne. 

Though not a privy councillor, Raleigh was pres- 
ent at the consultation, coming up from the country 
on purpose to sign the letter of welcome to the King. 
At the same time he declared his opinion, according 
to Aubrey,^ that "Twas the wisest way for them to 
keep the government in their own hands and set up a 
commonwealth and not be subject to a needy 
beggarly nation.' 

* It seems there were some of this cabal, ' Aubrey 
continues, 'who kept not this secret but that it 
came to King James's ear. ' 

If this story was true it would naturally increase 
the King's bias, and the antagonism he already 
entertained toward Sir Walter. James set out and 
crossed the border into his new kingdom early in 
April. There was a rush out of London on the part 
of the nobility and gentry to meet him. So great 
was the stampede that a proclamation was issued to 
forbid anyone who had no official right going to the 
reception of his Maje&ty, but Raleigh, contrary to 
Cecil's urgent advice, went, on the plea that he must 
obtain the royal authority for his administration of 
the Duchy of Cornwall. The King is said to have 
greeted the announcement of his name with the 

1 Lives of Eminent Men. By John Aubrey. 
108 



Plots and Conspiracies 

maladroit pun, 'Raleigh! On my soul, mon, I have 
heard rawly of thee. ' 

The gorgeous display in 'exceeding rich equipage' 
made by the noblemen who came to flatter and curry 
favour with James on his entry into England seems 
to have displeased rather than delighted him. He 
remarked that if his arrival had been opposed in- 
stead of hailed with rejoicing, he did not doubt that 
he could have asserted his claim by force and have 
overcome all objections. 'Would to God that had 
been put to the trial,' Raleigh exclaimed. 'Your 
Majesty would then have known your friends from 
your enemies.' 

The King interpreted this speech as having a 
double meaning, and never forgave it. Thus, at the 
start, personal acquaintance only strengthened the 
prejudice which had been so carefully fostered by 
misrepresentation, and Raleigh, indeed, was not 
kept long in suspense about the King's intentions 
toward him. Blow after blow fell on him rapidly. 
In May he was deprived of his rank as Captain of the 
Guard and of his most profitable source of income 
in the shape of monopolies, his right to the office of 
licenser of wines being called in question. His beau- 
tiful London home for twenty years, Durham 
House, with ' the prospect as pleasant as any in the 
world,' was taken away from him and restored to its 
original owners, the bishops of Durham. The 
King's warrant to the judges set forth that the law 
having decided that the persons ' that now dwell in 
the Bishop of Duresme's house called Duresme 
Place have no right therein and shall have notice to 
quit.' 

109 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

Raleigh had spent £2000 in improving and beauti- 
fying the old palace, but was not allowed to remove 
any fixtures. Though he begged to be allowed to 
stay on till Michaelmas, he was forced to turn 
out by midsummer in spite of his protest that 
*even a poor artificer is entitled to three months' 
notice from his landlord.' Poor Raleigh might 
well speak of himself now as *mad with intricate 
affairs and want of means.' He made every en- 
deavour to win his way with the new sovereign, by 
grovelling flattery and submission, while all the 
time his proud soul was in revolt. In July he was 
put under arrest, and Cecil wrote of the event as 
follows: 

* This hath been the cause. First he hath been 
discontented ever since the King came, and yet for 
those offices taken from him the King gave him 
£300 a year for life. Secondly his inwardness or 
his rather governing Lord Cobham's spirit made 
great suspicion that in these treasons he had 
part.' 

The 'treasons' here alluded to were the two plots 
afterward known as the 'Bye' and the 'Main.' It 
was almost impossible for the most unscrupulous 
of his accusers to implicate Raleigh in the Bye Plot, 
which was the outcome of Catholic discontent at the 
peaceful solution of the succession problem. It is 
true there were Puritan malcontents too, such as 
Lord Grey of Wilton, who joined with the priests, 
Watson and Clarke, and Lord Cobham's brother, 
George Brooke, Anthony Copley and Sir Griffith 
Markham in a conspiracy, the object of which was 
to surprise and seize James and force from him a 

110 



Plots and Conspiracies 

decree of absolute toleration for Roman Catholics. 
At his trial Raleigh was exonerated from having 
anything to do with this foolish and clumsily con- 
ceived plot, though his friend Lord Cobham must 
have known of it through his brother George Brooke. 
It was on his connexion with Cobham, weak-minded 
ayud loquacious, who was the chief mover in the 
*Main,' that the case trumped up against Raleigh 
was based. The Main Plot concerned the claim of 
Arabella Stuart and secret dealings with Spain. 
Cobham had been engaged in intrigues with Arem- 
berg, the Flemish envoy of the Infanta, and because 
he was the only man now on intimate terms of 
friendship with Raleigh, it was concluded that he 
must have been aware of Cobham's proceedings. 
George Brooke, while under examination about the 
Bye Plot, threw out dark hints of the other treason- 
able transactions, and, after a little pressure, con- 
fessed his knowledge of a more important conspiracy. 
He declared that he confidently thought what his 
brother knew was * known to the other,' and that 
Raleigh had been thought by the conspirators a 'fit 
man to be of the action.' Brooke, in fact, belonging 
to both conspiracies, gave every one away, in hopes 
of being paid for his information. He was an un- 
scrupulous scamp, with a handsome person and 
plausible manners. 

Raleigh, knowing only too well the vagaries of the 
law at that time with regard to treason, looked 
neither for justice nor leniency on the part of his 
judges. He felt keenly the hopelessness of his posi- 
tion. The populace hated him, as did the King, and 
the nobles, who had always been jealous of him. He 

111 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

and Cobham were lodged In the Tower, and before 
he had been tried he was treated as if his treason 
were proved. He had no choice but to resign his 
wardenship of the Stanneries and the governorship 
of Jersey. We have seen that Raleigh's was a 
temperament prone to be plunged in despair when 
overtaken by troubles, so it is easy to believe that 
while awaiting trial in the Tower he made an at- 
tempt on his life. The wound, inflicted by a table 
knife, was slight and he soon recovered. He also 
recovered his wonderful spirits and energy, and set 
himself with zeal to the task of defending himself. 

Before his arrest, Cobham, in an outburst of 
passion, had rounded on Raleigh during his examina- 
tion by the Lords of the Council regarding the Main 
Plot. He had called him traitor and villain, and 
sworn that he would never have 'entered into these 
courses but by the instigation of Raleigh who would 
never let him alone.' He soon^, however, repented 
the charges he had made against his friend, and 
was impatient to retract them. In the Tower he 
was anxious to do anything he could to atone for 
his hastiness and clear Sir Walter. He asked the 
governor of the Tower to be allowed to write a letter 
to the Council withdrawing his accusations. *God 
is my witness,' he said; *it doth touch my con- 
science.' The governor, Harvey, probably to 
please Cecil, declined to help him to express his 
penitence. Soon after Raleigh contrived that an 
apple containing a letter inside it should be tossed 
into the window of Cobham's cell in the Ward- 
robe Tower. It besought Cobham to confess that 
he had wronged him. The letter which Cobham 

112 



Plots and Conspiracies 

wrote in reply was not to Raleigh's contenting, and 
he begged earnestly that Cobham would vindicate 
him more completely at the approaching trial. 
But the repentant Cobham, eager not to put off 
but to make amends at once, sent another letter 
forthwith. This time Raleigh pronounced it Very 
good,' as well he might for it contained the following 
lines: 

*I never practised with Spain for your procure- 
ment. . . for anything I know you are as inno- 
cent and clear from any treason against the King 
as is subject living.' 

Raleigh cherished this letter in his bosom to serve 
as a refutation at his trial, and started in better 
hopes to face his accusers. 



113 



CHAPTER XVI: Raleigh's 
Trial at W^inchester^ 1603 

THE plague was raging in London that 
autumn; and King James and his Danish 
Queen held their court at Winchester 
Castle, whither the courts of justice were also re- 
moved from London. In grey November weather 
began the unravelling of the intricate 'Bye' and 
*Main' conspiracies and the trial of Sir Walter 
Raleigh. The prisoner went in his own coach, 
which was stormed on the way with brick-bats and 
tobacco-pipes hurled ferociously by the mob at 
the hero of Cadiz, the great adventurer, knight- 
errant and high favourite of the late Queen, and 
who, though he seemed cut out for a popular idol, 
was so strangely hated by the crowd. It was 
'touch and go whether Raleigh could be brought 
alive through such multitudes of unruly people,* 
wrote one of his keepers. 'It was almost incredible 
what bitter speeches they, the mob, exclaimed 
against him as he went along; which general hatred 
of the people, worse than death to some — he scorned 
and neglected as from base and rascal people.' 

The charge against Raleigh was for plotting with 
Cobham and Brooke 'to deprive the King of his 
crown and dignity, to subvert the government and 
alter the true religion established in England and to 
levy war against the King.' 

In these days such a travesty of justice as his 
trial would happily be impossible. From beginning 
to end it was a hollow mockery of the law, and is 
one of the darkest and most disgraceful blots in 

114 



Raleigh's Trial at JVinchester 

the annals of English jurisprudence. The judges 
on the Bench, before whom the accused knight de- 
fended himself with the most consummate skill and 
amazing spirit, were Sir John Popham, Lord Chiet 
Justice of England, and Chief Justices Gawdy and 
Warburton. Associated with these were Lord 
Thomas Howard, who had been with Raleigh at 
Cadiz; Lord Mountjoy ; the false Cecil; and Raleigh s 
most bitter enemy, Lord Henry Howard. 

Coke, the Attorney-General, a foul-mouthed, 
abusive scoundrel, opened the prosecution. Raleigh 
pleaded *Not Guilty,' and when addressing the 
jury requested them to remember that he was not 
so much as charged with the treason called the 
*Bye' which Coke made the theme of his opening 
speech. Lady Arabella Stuart, fair and lovely, was 
in the court as a looker-on. Lord Cecil, standmg at 
the Council board before the judges, said. There 
hath been touched upon the Lady Arabella Stuart, a 
near kinswoman of the King. Let us not scandalize 
the innocent by confusion of speech. She is as 
innocent of these things as any here, only she re- 
ceived a letter from my Lord Cobham to prepare her 
for the proceedings of the conspirators which she 
laughed at and sent to the King. So far was she 
from being malcontent, that she laughed the con- 
spirator Cobham to scorn.' 

The lady in question turned pale and trembled, 
but whispered something to the Lord High Admiral, 
who was sitting beside her, whereupon he rose and 
declared, 'This lady here doth protest upon her 
salvation that she never dealt in any of these things, 
and she willeth me to tell the Court.' 



115 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

Then Lord Cecil again spoke on the Lady Ara- 
bella's behalf, and said that Lord Cobham had 
sought an interview with her to tell her of people 
about the King who wanted to disgrace her, but 
she 'doubted this was but a trick.' 

Next, the dare-devil George Brooke avowed that 
his brother. Lord Cobham, had urged him to get 
Lady Arabella to write letters to the King of 
Spain, but he had never got her to do it. Sir 
Walter Raleigh referred to the lady slightingly as 
a woman *with whom he had no acquaintance and 
of all whom he ever saw, he liked her the least.' 

Raleigh was described as looking 'grey and sick.' 
He was baited by the bully Coke, bellowed at, 
entangled in his speech, called 'viper' and 'traitor,' 
and had insults heaped upon him. Yet he came 
through the ordeal magnificently, displaying a 'wit, 
learning and courage,' which won the admiration of 
every disinterested spectator. He pointed out that 
the bald statements of the Attorney- General with- 
out proof were not evidence. 'I do not hear that 
you have spoken one word against me. Here is no 
treason of mine done. If my Lord Cobham be a 
traitor, what is that to me.^' 

'All that he did,' replied Coke, 'was by thy 
instigation, thou viper! I will prove thee the 
rankest traitor in all England.' 

Whenever Raleigh seemed to be scoring a point, 
or the Attorney General's tongue failed to find 
more vituperative epithets, Cecil and Howard put 
in their word — all the etiquette of a court of justice 
was outraged. Once Coke shouted at the top of 
his voice, 'Your intent was to set up the Lady Ara- 

116 



Raleigh'' s Trial at ff^inchester 

bella as a titular Queen, and to dispose our present 
rightful King. Your jargon was peace, which 
meant Spanish invasion and Scottish subversion/ 
To this Raleigh answered, Xet me answer — it con- 
cerns my life.' 'Thou shalt not,' roared Coke, 
and Popham bade the prisoner hold his tongue. 
He was told that he was *a monster with an English 
face but a Spanish heart,' and so on. When at 
I ast he was given a chance to speak, Raleigh denied 
emphatically that he had ever entered into any plots 
with Cobham. As his supposed guilt rested alone 
on Lord Cobham's word, he begged to be confronted 
with him, but this was refused. He swore that he 
had been the life-long enemy of Spain. Would he 
then be so mad, he asked, knowing how poor, im- 
potent and bankrupt Spain was and the present 
powerful state of England, united with Scotland 
under one King, as to play Jack Cade now at Spain's 
bidding and dance while she pulled the strings. He 
explained his frequent meetings with Cobham as 
connected with private affairs. 'But for my knowing 
that he had conspired these things with Spain for 
Arabella against the King I protest before Almighty 
God I am as clear as whosoever here is freest.' 

If he, Cobham, the accused continued, came for- 
ward and on his honour said that he had been set up 
by him to engage in treasonable plots in the interest 
of Spain, he would submit to be dealt with as the 
King willed. Raleigh said this, confidently relying 
on that letter of recantation which Cobham had 
written to him in the Tower, which was to be his 
trump card against his accusers. Yet before he 
could produce it and prove that Cobham had, in his 

117 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

own handwriting, absolved him from blame. Coke 
out-trumped Raleigh by reading another letter from 
Cobham in which the poor, weak turn-coat had 
purchased favour by recalling his recantation. Tri- 
umphantly the Attorney-General sprung it on the 
prisoner, reading it aloud to the court. *I have 
thought fit in duty to my Sovereign and in discharge 
of my conscience,' it began, * to set this down to your 
Lordships, wherein I protest upon my soul to write 
nothing but what is true ' 

He goes on to say that * this is no time to dissemble 
with God,' and tells how Raleigh had besought him 
to absolve him in the letter which he wrote from his 
cell in the Tower, that the truth was that Raleigh 
had suggested to him to obtain through Count 
Aremberg a pension of £1500 a year from Spain to 
pay spies to report on all that passed in England. 
He blames Raleigh for everything that has befallen 
him, and gives an account of the incident of the 
apple being thrown in at his window. 

For a moment the revelation of Cobham's perfidy 
upset the prisoner's equilibrium. He stood utterly 
overwhelmed and 'much amazed.' But he rallied 
and soon gathered his spirits again sufficiently to 
continue his brilliant defence. He produced Cob- 
ham's letter, and Cecil consented to read it aloud. 
It was difficult to decide when the pitiable, perjured 
creature had lied and when he had spoken the truth. 
He had contradicted himself so often. But judges 
and jury made it a foregone conclusion that when 
Cobham's evidence was against Raleigh it was the 
truth, and he was found guilty. 

Before the verdict was given, Raleigh again pro- 

118 



Raleigh'^ s Trial at TJ^inchester 

tested vainly with impassioned vigour that Cobham 
was false. He again solemnly affirmed that he was 
innocent of intrigues with Spain, that he knew 
nothing of the plot with regard to Arabella Stuart, 
that he was ignorant of Cobham's dealings with 
Aremberg. Sentence of death was passed by the 
judge, Popham, and in language more coarse and 
undignified than even Coke's had been, and the 
disgraceful scene came to an end. 

One who was present at the trial has recorded thus 
Raleigh's part in it. 'He did as much as wit of 
man could devise to clear himself. Sir Walter 
Raleigh served for a whole act and played all the 
parts himself. He answered with that wit, learning, 
courage and judgment that, save it went with the 
hazard of his life, it was the happiest day that he 
had ever spent; and so well he shifted all advantages 
that were taken against him that were not an ill 
name half-hanged in the opinion of all men, he 
would have been acquitted." 

The impression produced on two impartial ob- 
severs by Raleigh's eloquent defence was further 
given in a report to the King. One said that ' Never 
man spoke so well in times past, nor would do in the 
times to come.' The other's testimony was still 
more striking, for he declared * that whereas when he 
first saw Sir Walter he would have gone a hundred 
miles to see him hanged he was so led by the common 
hatred, he would ere they parted have gone a thou- 
sand to save his life.' 

Even the common people among the audience 
were equally impressed by the pluck of the man they 
had detested, and often hissed Coke's brutal attacks. 

119 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

The French Ambassador, Beaumont, probably 
voiced the general opinion when he said Raleigh was 
guilty, but had been unlawfully sentenced. After all 
if everything with which he was formally charged 
had been proved he would not have been guilty of 
treason. For, listening to Cobham's schemes for 
getting money from Spain, and having demanded a 
pension in reward for the disclosure of State secrets 
was not a treasonable offence. Many of his dis- 
tinguished contemporaries in the last reign had been 
pensioners of Spain, and seen no harm in it. Cob- 
ham's kinsman. Sir Edward Stafford, the English 
Ambassador in Paris, had sold secrets to Spain be- 
fore the Armada. The selfrighteous Cecil himself 
had been in the pay of Spain, and Northumberland 
in that of France. Such was the lax political mor- 
ality of the times — the 'spacious' times of great 
Elizabeth. 

The whole fabric of Raleigh's supposed guilt was 
built on the shifty word of Cobham, well hit off by 
Raleigh's description of him as a *base, dishonour- 
able poor soul.' A structure of lies reared on so un- 
stable a foundation is easily dispersed by the truth 
of history, and no one believes to-day that there was 
ever the faintest shadow of eviklence to support the 
theory of Raleigh's guilt. On his way to his trial, 
hooted and jeered at by the multitude, who would 
have liked to tear him to pieces, when he came out 
convicted of treason and condemned to death, 
Raleigh became all at once an object of universal 
sympathy and admiration. Then it was that the 
fickle mob reared him to his niche in the Valhalla of 
our heroes, from which he has never since fallen. 

120 



CHAPTER XVII: The 

Reprieve 

THE ringleader of the 'Bye,' George Brooke, 
who was also steeped in the conspiracy 
of the *Main,' was beheaded in the follow- 
ing December at Winchester, meeting his death with 
the same airy nonchalance as he had lived. The 
unfortunate priests, Watson and Clarke, were drawn 
and quartered, and their remains exhibited to the 
public view on the city gates. 

But the King was advised on all sides not to begin 
his reign with wholesale bloodshed, so the sentence 
on the other prisoners was commuted at the last 
minute. The Queen was specially urgent in peti- 
tioning that Raleigh's life should be spared. The 
Spanish Ambassador (the first there had been for 
twenty years) also joined his voice to hers in plead- 
ing for clemency on behalf of the condemned 
conspirators. 

James at first affected to be deaf to all entreaties 
for mercy. All the same he was not a man of 
blood and iron, and had no intention really of the 
sentence of death being carried out. He could not 
resist indulging in a characteristic surprise trick, 
however, and signed the death warrants at Wilton, 
where he and his court were being entertained by the 
Earl of Pembroke, as the plague still raged in Lon- 
don. Those who were to have suffered first — Mark- 
ham, Lord Grey, and Cobham — were, one by one, 
led forth to the scaffold, and Raleigh watched them 
from his prison window through a veil of silvery 
rain. 

121 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

Markham, it was said, looked sad and heavy, the 
very picture of sorrow, though he bore himself 
resolutely; Lord Grey, staunch in his puritanism, 
was full of dignity and bade his friends a cheerful 
farewell. Cobham appeared as ready to die as the 
rest, and his brave front on the scaffold was a con- 
trast to his wavering poltroonery during his first im- 
prisonment and at the trial. He declared 'that 
what he had said of Sir Walter was true as he hoped 
for his soul's resurrection,' but it was not clear to 
which statement he referred, for he had said so many 
contradictory things that all could not be true. 

And as they had, one by one, been led forth, so 
Raleigh saw the prisoners, one by one, removed from 
the place of execution. Next he heard them being 
harangued by the Sheriff, and then it must have 
dawned on him, though he was too far off to hear 
distinctly what was said, that his fellow-prisoners 
were not to be executed. Soon afterward the news 
of his own reprieve was brought to him. 

The man who had faced death a hundred times 
with splendid com^age, who had fearlessly run the 
gauntlet of rebel spears and ambushes in Ireland, 
was not above praying for his life as abjectly as any 
craven. While he lay under sentence of death, 
Raleigh's conduct was indeed marked by a cowardice 
for which all who admire him most must feel regret, 
if not shame. He humiliated himself to the dust 
to beg for his life in letters of exhortation to the 
Lords of the Council, to Cecil and to James. In 
these humble supplications Lady Raleigh joined, 
casting dignity and pride to the winds. They abso- 
lutely grovelled, so that Raleigh, a little later, seems 

122 



The Reprieve 



to have been disgusted at his own self-abasement, 
for he instructed his wife to secure, if possible, the 
letters in which he had sued for his life to the Lords. 
*God knows,' he wrote, 'that it was for you and 
yours that I desired it. But it is true that I dis- 
dain myself for begging it.' The letter was written 
when death seemed inevitable, and is expressed in 
that exquisite and pathetic English of which Raleigh 
was a supreme master. It shows the noblest side of 
hi^ versatile character, even as the letters he himself 
thought of *with disdain' show the basest. *You 
shall receive, dear wife, my last words in these my 
last lines. My love I send you that you may keep 
it when I am dead and my counsel that you may 
remember it when I am no more. I would not with 
my last will present you with sorrows, dear Bess. 
Let them go to the grave with me and be buried in 
the dust . . . and seeing it is not the will of God 
that I shall ever see you in this life, bear my destruc- 
tion gently and with a heart like yourself. First I 
send you all the thanks my heart can conceive or my 
pen express for your many troubles and cares taken 
for me which — though they have not taken effect as 
you wished — yet my debt is to you nevertheless, 
but pay it I never shall in this world.' Then he 
begs her not to mourn too long, suggests her marry- 
ing again, and deplqres that he leaves her and his 
boy so badly off. 'Remember your poor child,' he 
goes on, 'for his father's sake that comforted you and 
loved you in his happiest time, and know it, dear 
wife, that your son is the child of a true man, who 
in his own respect despiseth death and all his mis- 
shapen and ugly forms. I cannpt write much. God 

123 



Sir JVa/ter Raleigh 

knows how hardly I stole this time when all sleep, 
and it is time to separate my thoughts from the 
world. Beg my dead body which living was denied 
you. ... I can write no more. Time and death 
call me away .... My true wife, farewell. Bless 
my poor boy, pray for me. My true God hold you 
both in his arms. Written with the dying hand of 
sometime thy husband, but now alas overthrowne. 
Yours that was, but now not my own 

W. Raleigh.' 

Very different from this touching epistle were 
the cringing and flattering letters which Raleigh 
addressed to his ' Most Dread Sovereign.' He pro- 
tested before him and the 'Everlasting God' that he 
never invented treason, consented to treason, nor 
performed treason. *I do therefore on the knees of 
my heart, beseech your Majesty's great compassion 
to take counsel from your own sweet and merciful 
disposition and to remember that I have loved your 
Majesty now twenty years for which your Majesty 
have yet given me no reward . . . Save me, there- 
fore, most merciful Prince that I may owe to your 
Majesty my life itself, than which there cannot be 
a greater debt. Send it to me at least, my Sover- 
eign Lord, that I may pay it again for your service 
when your Majesty shall please. If the law de- 
stroy me your Majesty shall put me out of your 
power and I shall have then none to fear, none to 
reverence but the King of Kings . . . . ' 

Thus did the once haughty favourite of England's 
Elizabeth humble himself and fawn at the feet of 
her ignoble and unworthy successor. 

Less than a week after the painful drama enacted 

124 



The Reprieve 

on the scaffold at Winchester, Raleigh and his 
fellow-conspirators were brought to London and 
lodged first in the Tower and then in the Fleet and 
then again in the Tower, till finally Raleigh was 
settled with his wife and child in a suite of rooms in 
the Bloody Tower, where he was not badly off for 
accommodation. Here he began to concentrate his 
mind on how best to provide for the future of his 
wife and little son. Though he was reprieved he 
was not pardoned, and was beggared of ' all his vast 
emoluments and wealth.' He had sold his estates 
in Ireland long before to the Earl of Cork, but his 
beloved Sherborne was still left, and he hoped it 
might escape confiscation. It was in the hands of 
royal commissioners, and greedy agents were plun- 
dering everything they could grasp. 

His patent for the licensing of wines had passed 
to the Earl of Nottingham, the new title of the Lord 
Admiral Howard, and all his oflfices were forfeited. 
Yet he strove hard to save the ashes of his fortune. 
His wife bravely struggled to help, with the co-opera- 
ion of Cecil who, now that there was no longer 
cause to fear Raleigh's rivalry in the esteem of the 
new sovereign, had partly resumed his earlier friend- 
ly relations with him. By his intervention the in- 
terests of Lady Raleigh and her son in Sherborne 
were safe-guarded, and the estates conveyed for 
sixty years in trust for them. But through some 
flaw in the deed of conveyance, which had been 
drawn up in 1602, it was declared void. The 
property on which Raleigh had lavished so much care 
and a small fortune was ultimately bestowed on the 
infamous Carr, James's handsome and unworthy 

125 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

favourite. It was in vain that Lady Raleigh pros- 
trated herseK at the feet of the King and implored 
to have her home and hearth spared. The only 
answer she got was 'Na! Na! I maun hae the land. 
I maun hae it for Carr.' For this cultivated mon- 
arch, who was versed in the classics and could, if 
he like, converse in Latin and Greek, always used 
the broadest Scotch vernacular in everyday conver- 
sation. 

It is to be regretted that Raleigh should have 
degraded himself to plead for his estates to such 
a despicable creature as Carr. He wrote to him 
in his most pathetic vein, telling him that after 
* many great losses and many years of sorrow . . . 
it comes to my knowledge that yourself have 
been persuaded to give me and mine our last 
fatal blow, by obtaining from His Majesty the in- 
heritance of my children and nephews lost in law. 
This done there remaineth nothing with me but the 
bare name of life, despoiled of all else but the grief 
and sorrow thereof — and for yourself, sir, seeing your 
day is but now in dawn and mine come to the even- 
ing, your own virtues and the King's grace assuring 
you of many good fortunes and much honour, I be- 
seech you not to begin your first buildings upon the 
ruins of the innocent.' 

Carr got Sherborne, but it did not prosper in his 
hands, and changed ownership eight times in as 
many years. Before its former owner came out of 
the Tower, the Earl of Somerset (the title given to 
the upstart Carr) had entered it in disgrace, a far 
more merited disgrace than Raleigh's. 

Lady Raleigh, in consideration of her interest in 

126 



The Reprieve 

the estate, was granted £8000, which, though it was 
not all paid, saved her and the family from absolute 
penury. Thus they settled down to twelve long 
years of captivity. But the indomitable spirit of 
Raleigh was never quenched. He chafed against 
the bars of his prison like a snared eagle; his hair 
grew white as snow, and his turbulent pulse became 
sluggish, his body numb from damp and agues; yet 
his wonderful mind suffered no eclipse, and his 
intellect, brilliant as a cut diamond, flashed forth 
brighter rays than ever. 



127 



CHAPTER XVIII: The Eagle 
in his Cage 

THERE must have been a sort of cynical 
generosity in Raleigh's attitude toward 
those who had injured him, otherwise it is 
hardly credible that he would have liked to use 
Cecil (by this time Lord Salsbury) as the medium for 
his constant petitions and begging of favours. 

No sooner had his life been spared than he was 
beseeching for fresh concessions with eloquent in- 
sistence. Very little came of his requests, yet he 
did not reproach Cecil, and appears to have really 
retained personal affection for the crooked little 
man who had served him so ill and helped in his 
ruin more than anyone else. Cecil told Lady 
Raleigh decisively that ' as for a pardon it could not 
be done,' but still Sir Walter continued to beg with- 
out ceasing, not only for his liberty, but for more 
luxuries and consideration in the Tower and for the 
preservation of his property. 

Nevertheless, for the next twelve years he was to 
be kept in confinement, languishing in health if not 
in mind, never abandoning hope of one day re- 
trieving his fortunes. 

Once only during these twelve years he enjoyed a 
temporary change of air to the Fleet on the occasion 
of Royalty visiting the Tower to witness the odious, 
but then not unusual, spectacle of a lion being 
worried to death by two mastiffs. 

His apartments in the Bloody, or Garden, Tower 
were sufficiently spacious to accommodate his wife 
and their children (the second boy, Carew, being 

128 



The Ragle in his Cage 

born soon after they came) and their staff of serv- 
ants. The terrace overlooking the river and wharf 
was his recreation ground, and his friends and rela- 
tions were allowed to come and see him, bringing him 
books and tidings of the outside world. But the 
place was damp, being so close to the Thames and 
the stagnant water of the moat. Even during the 
first years of his imprisonment Raleigh complained 
that the confined air was killing him, and that his 
boy had 'lain these fourteen days next door to a 
woman sick of the plague whose child had died of 
it.' In 1606 damp and cold had told on him so 
much that his doctor gave an alarming report of 
his health. He was in daily danger of death, one 
side of him was numb, his fingers deformed with 
rheumatism, and even his tongue affected so that it 
was feared he might lose his power of speech. 

This brought about the change in his lodging 
which his own prayers had failed to accomplish. 
Leave was granted him to build a little room adja- 
cent to the outhouse in the garden, which he had al- 
ready used as a laboratory. Here was now his 
sleeping chamber, and things improved. The fas- 
cination of his personality was not without effect on 
his governors. Both Sir John Peyton and Sir 
George Harvey, his successor as Lieutenant of the 
Tower, did all they could to make his captivity less 
irksome. Sir George frequently invited him to din- 
ner and allowed him the run of his private garden 
and encouraged him in his chemical experiments. 
Thus within the walls of his prison Raleigh found 
an outlet for his boundless energy, and increased 
his fame for posterity by his literary labours. 

129 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

Among his servants, who lodged near him and 
were in constant attendance on him, were those 
swarthy Indians whom he had brought from Guiana 
— picturesque figures with their feathers and beads 
adding colour and romance within that abode of 
sighs and groans, shattered hopes and blighted lives. 
They no doubt helped in the mixing and brewing 
of the Grand Cordial, the balsam of Guiana, which 
gained much reputation as a miraculous cure of every 
possible disease, though more than one patient is 
said to have died from the effects of it. The Count- 
ess of Beaumont, when she came to the Tower to see 
the lions, begged, as she passed the great human 
'lion' in the Tower Garden, that he would give her 
some of the balsam, and this lady does not appear 
to have been any the worse for it. 

The time that Raleigh did not spend among his 
jars and phials making chemical and mineralogical 
experiments, or, quill in hand, writing The History 
of the World, was mostly passed parading the terrace, 
to the delight of crowds on the wharf, who came 
from far and near to look at him. Aubrey tells us 
that he was dressed usually in a * velvet cap laced, a 
rich gown and trunk hose,' and glowered fiercely on 
his old foes. But the feelings of the mob toward 
Raleigh had undergone a change and were no longer 
antagonistic. Indeed, they regarded him as a 
celebrity whom it was worth coming miles to see. 
In his misfortune he had become almost a popular 
hero. 

On the appointment of Sir William Ward to the 
Governorship of the Tower, Raleigh's showing him- 
self to the people was regarded with suspicion. A 

130 



The Eagle in his Cage 

brick wall was built in front of the Bloody Tower, 
and Ward complained to Cecil, ' Sir Walter Raleigh 
doth show himself upon the wall of his garden to the 
view of the people who gaze upon him and he stareth 
upon them, which he doeth in his cunning humour.' 
Under Ward's governorship irritating restrictions 
were imposed on the distinguished prisoners, and 
Lady Raleigh was forbidden to drive her coach 
through the courtyard. Raleigh himself was per- 
petually under surveillance, and often brought before 
the Council to be cross-examined. He was thought 
to have had some knowledge of the Gunpowder Plot, 
and indeed he was suspected of complicity in every 
plot that was going just then, and once, for no 
apparent reason, he was more closely imprisoned for 
three months and separated from his wife, who, for 
the time being, was dismissed from the Tower. 

Yet Raleigh's fame grew in prison. Even in the 
days of his glittering splendour he had never been 
more talked of. He was regarded almost as a 
magician, and his Grand Cordial was begged for from 
all parts of Europe This concoction consisted of 
forty different herbs, roots and seeds, besides other 
things, macerated in spirits of wine and distilled; 
then it was combined with powdered bezoar, stones, 
pearls, red coral, deer's horn, ambergris, musk, 
antimony and various sorts of earth and white 
sugar. The Queen, Anne of Denmark, partook of 
the mixture when she was ill, and the fact that it 
did her good instead of kiUing her shows that she 
must have had a strong constitution. 

This Queen was full of sentiment and romance, 
and she was captivated by the glamour that hung 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

over the King's victim in the Tower, and never 
wearied of interceding for him and urging the hero's 
release. And in her young son, * the hopeful Prince 
Henry,' Raleigh had another champion against the 
malignant tyranny and injustice of the King. 

The nation had never built higher hopes on any 
heir to the throne than on this boy, who promised, 
like the chivalrous Black Prince and like the Prince 
Arthur of later times, to be a wise and enlightened 
sovereign when his turn should come to reign, but 
who was cut off in the promise of his youth before 
that turn came. 

Henry, Prince of Wales, noble, generous and 
tolerant, had convinced himself that Raleigh had 
been wrongly condemned. After weighing all the 
evidence for and against him and following his trial 
with the keenest intelligence, he joined with his 
mother in sparing no efforts to get him released. 
He sat at the feet of the great prisoner, hung on his 
lips and believed in him as in an oracle of wisdom 
and learning. He sometimes expressed himself with 
hot indignation about his father's treatment of his 
most illustrious subject,^ and was determined that 
he would not allow himself and his sister to be 
married off to a daughter and son of the Spanish and 
Catholic Duke of Savoy without seeking Raleigh's 
counsel. Thus the prisoner, lost as he was to the 
world, was given an opportunity of asserting in- 
directly his authority in public affairs and showing 
that his old animus against Spain was still alive. 
He penned two masterly treatises for the young 

**No king but my father would keep such a bird in a cage,' he is 
reported to have said. 

132 



The Eagle in his Cage 

Prince's guidance, full of hostility to the idea of 
the proposed Spanish marriages, and advocating the 
alliance of Princess Elizabeth with the Protestant 
Prince Palatine, Frederic. 

It was a risky attitude to take up, being in exact 
opposition to the King's view, but probably by this 
time Raleigh had given up expecting any favour 
from the King and based all his hopes on the heir to 
the throne. The Prince further consulted him on 
shipbuilding and Sir Walter produced for his in- 
struction 'The discourse of the invention of ships, 
observations concerning the Royal Navy and sea 
service,' with which the Prince was delighted. 

Undaunted by the ill-success of his efforts to se- 
cure Raleigh's release. Prince Henry next attempted 
to get the Sherborne estates taken away from 
Carr and restored to Raleigh. He prevailed on his 
father indeed to buy them back for £20,000 and 
grant them to himself, but before he could convey 
the estate to his mentor he was taken ill with the 
fever of which he died. 

Six months before Cecil's death had occurred, and 
if Raleigh made no pretence of lamenting it, or of 
respecting the memory of the man who had been 
the chief worker of his ruin, the removal of Lord 
Salsbury from the scene meant that a vague hope 
of gaining his liberty through his false friend's 
influence was gone. But the young Prince's death 
was a far more serious loss not only to Raleigh's 
hopes, but to those of the whole nation. 

The life of the well-beloved Prince was hanging 
on a thread when one mild November evening there 
appeared above the gables and housetops of the 

133 



Sir JValter Raleigh 

city a lunar rainbow in the grey sky, said to be an 
omen of evil. This sign in the heavens convinced 
the people that the Prince, whose forwardness in 
wisdom had so won their love and esteem, could not 
recover. The augury proved a true one, for though 
Sir Walter Raleigh, at the heart-broken Queen's 
request, mixed a special dose of the Grand Cordial 
and sent it to the dying boy, he only slightly rallied, 
and passed away that night. There were rumours 
of poison, obviously without foundation. But the 
Queen's faith in Raleigh was implicit, and he had 
told her that his remedy was proof against every- 
thing except poison, so when her son died she came 
to the conclusion that he had been poisoned. 

For Raleigh the life of the Prince was of supreme 
importance, and his death an unspeakable blow. 
His son had wrung from the King a promise that 
Raleigh was to be pardoned and set at liberty before 
the coming Christmas, but his dying before that date 
ended all prospects of freedom, at any rate for several 
years to come. More closely than ever were the 
mighty gates of the Tower closed on him and his 
fellow-prisoners, among whom were Hariot the 
mathematician; Sir Thomas Overbury, there to 
meet a tragic fate; poor, vacillating, weak-minded 
Cobham; the Earl of Northumberland, full of 
gallantry and learning; and fair Arabella Stuart, the 
most pitiful figure of all that hapless company, 
rousing the dismal echoes with her weeping and mad 
laughter. 



134 



CHAPTER XIX: ' The History 
of the World' 

IT was well for posterity that Sir Walter Raleigh 
employed the time that hung heavy on his 
hands in the Tower in more ways besides 
dabbling in chemistry and brewing cordials. To 
his imprisonment we owe the colossal fragment of his 
History of the World, which is such a valuable con- 
tribution to English literature. ^ Vast in conception, 
the whole had been discussed in detail with Prince 
Henry, and was to have been dedicated to him when 
finished. The author ends the first part with an 
eloquent eulogy of his young patron, who, if he had 
lived to succeed his father, would have raised Raleigh 
again to a position of prosperity and grandeur. 

The story goes that the bookseller who published 
the first edition in 1614 told Raleigh that he should 
be a loser by it, whereupon Sir Walter, in a passion, 
said that * since the world did not understand it, 
they should not have his second part, which he took 
and threw into the fire, and burnt before his face.' 
But it is more likely that this relates to other trea- 
tises and manuscripts which he is known to have 
written about the same period. The History, as far 

1 Oliver Cromwell recommended it to his son Richard. Hampden 
was its zealous student and admirer. Nonconformists and Puritans 
vied with churchmen and cavaliers in extolling it. Montrose read 
it greedily as a boy and was inspired by its great deeds and records 
of past heroes. The 1614 edition was found in the knapsack of the 
Queen of Hearts, Princess Elizabeth, when her luggage was captured 
at Prague by the Spaniards in 1620, showing that Raleigh's History 
of the World had been her travelling companion. 

125 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

as it goes, is one of the three greatest works of genius 
produced in prison, the other two being Don Quixote, 
and Bunyan's Pilgrim^s Progress, 

The writer acknowledges in his preface the 
stupendous magnitude of the undertaking attempted 
in the evening of a tempestuous Hfe (he was 59 
when he began the work), and then gives a pre- 
liminary review of his subject, which he sets forth 
in graceful and dignified style. He depicts history 
as a whole, beginning with the creation, giving 
illustrations, from the times of Pharaoh down to 
those of the Tudors, to show God's judgments on 
kings and the retribution which follows bloodshed. 
The whole of the preface enforces the lesson of the 
responsibility of rulers, and attacks the principle of 
the Divinity of Monarchs, for which James lived to 
promulgate and for which his son, Charles Stuart, 
lost his head. Raleigh holds up to reprobation 
Henry VII and Henry VIII as cruel monsters; 
throughout he is down on the tyranny of kings, and 
shows how Divine Justice is meted out in the end 
to the most powerful and exalted who have treated 
the people cruelly and unfairly. And yet he inter- 
lards his criticism of James's Tudor forerunners 
with the grossest flattery of the reigning boor, declar- 
ing that he exceeds by many degrees all who have 
gone before him, in divine as well as human under- 
standing. Nevertheless, James took personal um- 
brage at the thrusts at monarchy, and condemned 
the book as being 'too saucy in the censuring of 
princes.' 

In spite of pointing out that the supreme end 
of good government must be the happiness of the 

136 



The History of the JVorld 

governed, Raleigh does not conceal his detestation 
of democracy, or what was then understood by 
democracy. In this respect he was the super-man 
who despises and mistrusts the common herd. He 
compares the populace with 'barking dogs,' and 
avers that there is nothing in any state so terrible 
as ' a powerful and authorised ignorance.' 

He never swerved from his ideal that the chosen 
few of a strong and powerful race were privileged 
to govern the many according to their own standard 
of righteousness to promote the well-being of all. 
He could be gracious to those beneath him as long 
as they were absolutely submissive to his will, and 
was a kind master to his servants, especially to the 
Indians, who venerated and adored him, but politi- 
cally he scorned and hated the 'common people.' 

Among his fellow-prisoners were scholars who 
doubtless rendered Raleigh valuable assistance in 
his work. There was Hariot, who had been his 
right hand in brighter days at Durham House; there 
was Serjeant Hoskins, the man of letters, poet and 
polished stylist; the scholarly and cultured Nor- 
thumberland, and others. Ben Jonson, from with- 
out the prison walls, contributed the introductory 
verses, but for all this the work is wholly and char- 
acteristically Raleigh's. It is full of little sidelights 
on his own personal history. It has here and there 
the wit and charm and apt allusion which are the salt 
of history and make the 'dry est bones' alive. 

He must have known himself that he could never 
live to finish the work on the gigantic scale he had 
planned. The first six books, beginning with the 
creation, only get as far as the second Macedonian 

137 



Sir Walter Raleigh 






War, and it was impossible that he could eveJ have 
written a history of the whole world down :o his 
own day at such detailed length — still it is an d will 
ever remain a work of gorgeous promise and omnore 
significance in its majestic design than many a finished 
masterpiece. The following passages are a handful 
of treasure gathered at random from its pages :\ 

'For myself if conscience have in anything served 
my country and prized it before my private, the 
general acceptation can yield me no other profit at 
this time than doth a fair sunshine day to a seaman 
after shipwreck, and the contrary no other harm 
than an outrageous tempest after the port attained. 
I know that I lost the love of many for my fidelity 
towards her (Queen Elizabeth) whom I must still 
honour in the dust ... of those that did it and 
by what device they did it. He that is the Supreme 
Judge of all the world hath taken the account. So 
that of this kind of suffering I must say with Seneca, 
Malo o'pino bene parta deledat. So for other men, 
if there be any that have made themselves fathers 
of that fame which have been begotten of them, 
I can neither envy such their purchased glory, nor 
much lament my own mishap in that kind, but 
content myself to say with Virgil, Sic vos non vohes 
in many particulars. 

Ambition and Glory 

'If we seek a reason of the succession and con- 
tinuance of the boundless ambition in mortal men, 
we may add that the kings and princes of the 
world have always laid before them the actions 
but not the ends of those great ones which preceded 

138 



The History of the Tf^orld 

them. They are always transported with the glory 
of the one, but they never mind the misery of the 
other till they find the experience in themselves. 
They neglect the advice of God while they enjoy 
life or hope: but they follow the counsel of Death 
upon his first approach. ^ 

Fame 

* To these undertakings the greatest Lords of the 
world have been stirred up rather by the desire of 
fame, which plougheth up the air and soweth in the 
winds, than by the affection of bearing rule, which 
draweth after it so much vexation and so many cares, 
and that this is true the good advice of Cineas to 
Pyrrhus proves. And certainly as fame hath often 
been dangerous to the living, so is it to the dead 
no good at all because separate from knowledge. 
Which, were it obtained, and the extreme ill bargain 
of buying this lasting discourse understood by them 
which are dissolved, they themselves would then 
rather have wished to have stolen out of the world 
without noise than to be put in mind that they 
have purchased the report of their actions in the 
world by rapine, oppression and cruelty, by giving 
in spoil the innocent and labouring soul to the idle 
and insolent, and by having emptied the cities of the 
world of their ancient inhabitants and filled them 
again with so many and so variable sorrows. 

Great Men 

* There are some things else, you will say, and of 
greater regard than gathering of riches, such as the 

1 History of the World, Bk., V. ch. vi. 
139 



Sir TValter Raleigh 

reverend respect that is held of great men and the 
honour done unto him by all sorts of people. And 
it is true indeed provided that an inward love for 
their justice and piety accompany the outward 
worship given to their places and power, without 
which what is the applause of the multitude but as 
the outcry of a herd of animals, who, without the 
knowledge of any true cause, please themselves with 
the noise they make, for seeing it is a thing exceed- 
ing rare to distinguish virtue and fortune, the most 
impious if prosperous have ever been applauded, 
the most virtuous if unprosperous have ever been 
despised. 

God 

* There is not anything in this world of more 
efficacy and force to allure and draw to it the hearts 
of men than God which is the summum honum. He 
is carefully desired and continually sought for of all 
creatures, for all regard Him as their last end and 
refuge. Light things apply themselves upwards, 
heavy things downwards, the heavens to revolution, 
the herbs to flowers, trees to bear fruit, beasts to 
preserve their kind, and man to seeking his tran- 
quility and everlasting glory. But inasmuch as God 
is of so high a nature that the sense of and under- 
standing of man cannot concern it, every man 
directly turns himself to that place where He 
leaves some print of this power and declares some 
sign of His existence and to such persons to whom 
he seemeth more especially to have , revealed 
Himself. 



140 



The History of the TVorld 

*God Whom the wisest men acknowledge to be 
a Power ineffable and virtue infinite; an Under- 
standing which itself can only comprehend; an 
essence eternal and spiritual of absolute pureness 
and simplicity; was and is pleased to make Himself 
known by the work of the world in the wonderful 
magnitude whereof (all which he embraceth, filleth 
and sustaineth) we behold the image of that glory 
which cannot be measured, and withal that One and 
yet universal Nature which cannot be defined. In 
the glorious lights of heaven we perceive a shadow 
of His Divine Countenance, in His merciful pro- 
vision for all that live, His manifold goodness, 
and lastly, in creating and making existent the 
world universal by the absolute art of his own word. 
His power and Almightiness which power, light, 
virtue, wisdom, and goodness being all but attributes 
of One simple essence and One God we in all admire 
and in part discern, in the disposition, order and 
variety of celestial and terrestrial bodies, terrestrial 
in their strange and manifold diversities, celestial 
in their beauty and magnitude which in their con- 
tinual and contrary motions are neither repugnant, 
intermixed nor confounded. By these potent effects 
we approach to the knowledge of the Omnipotent 
Cause and by these motions their Almighty Ruler.' 



141 



CHAPTER XX: Raleigh 
Released 

THROUGH all his manifold misfortunes, 
disappointments and sorrow, Raleigh never 
lost sight of the one great inspiration of his 
life. The colonial expansion and ascendancy of 
England over-seas was always nearest his heart, a 
dream that he dreamed as ceaselessly in prison as he 
had done when he was at liberty to try and put it 
into execution. 

The thought of past failures had no power to 
lessen his ambition. His faith in the sources of 
potential wealth which might accrue to the British 
Empire through the colonization of Virginia and 
Guiana remained unshaken. So long ago as his 
return from Cadiz news had reached him that the 
Indians on the coast of Guiana had been inquiring 
pathetically why the great White Chief, who had 
promised to protect them against the Spaniards, 
did not come back. In prison he heard that 
the Spanish invaders were busy endeavouring to 
establish a colony on the Orinoco, where they in- 
tended to build an extensive city to serve as their 
head-quarters when sending out reconnoitring ex- 
peditions to Guiana — Raleigh's land of golden 
promise. Moved by these rumours, Raleigh re- 
newed his desperate appeals to those in authority to 
prevent Spain stealing a march on England on the 
other side of the Atlantic. He had managed to enlist 
Prince Henry's interest in the Virginian plantation, 
and a new Charter had been granted in 1609 to the 
* Company of Adventurers and Planters of the Colony 

142 



Raleigh Released 

of Virginia/ which led to the establishment of a 
permanent English settlement in North America. 
Raleigh in prison reaped no benefit therefrom save 
the lasting posthumous honour of having converted 
the great northern continent into an English-speak- 
ing country. Thus the idea that he had upheld for 
thirty years, in the teeth of opposition and reverses, 
triumphed, the idea that the continent of America 
was by * God's providence reserved for England.' 

With regard to Guiana gold was to be the magnet 
to draw money from capitalists; the prospect of 
getting rich quickly was to be the bait. Raleigh, in 
1611, earnestly besought the Queen to give her 
patronage to an expedition and to use her influence 
with King James to get him released so that he 
might conduct it in person. B ut although Win wood, 
the secretary who had succeeded Cecil, was favour- 
able to the scheme, it came to nothing. Over and 
over again he periodically entreated, only to be each 
time refused. Even when he abandoned the notion 
of going himself, and offered to send Kemys as 
his deputy, he failed to obtain leave or sufficient 
support for a large undertaking. Small expeditions 
he managed to dispatch, and these kept Guiana 
from being forgotten by the public. The stories of 
chiefs who glittered from head to foot with gold 
dust; of Manoa, the magic city, not yet discovered; 
of mountains shining with gems, were still circulated 
to inflame the imagination and excite the greed of 
Raleigh's fellow-countrymen. And at last those in 
high places became infected with the germs of the 
gold fever which the grand old adventurer cultivated 
so assiduously within the walls of his prison. George 

143 



Sir W^alter Raleigh 

Villiers, afterward Duke of Buckingham, a new 
and more splendid favourite than the infamous 
Carr (who with his lady and fellow-worker in 
wickedness, were now prisoners too in the Tower), en- 
thralled with the prospect of acquiring fabulous and 
undreamed of riches, accepted a bribe to back the 
enterprise. 

Seven hundred and fifty pounds in hard cash 
bought the influence of such inestimable importance 
to Raleigh, and in 1615 Villiers and his party set 
to work to pick the lock of Raleigh's prison. The 
favourite obtained a warrant from the King, dated 
March 19th, which permitted the illustrious prisoner 
to go abroad to make preparations for his voyage. 

Then the doors of his prison swung back and, 
after twelve years, Raleigh, grey-haired and broken 
down in body, was a free though not a pardoned man. 
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the eyes of 
Europe were fixed on that bent and com-ageous 
figure as it emerged from the shadows of the Tower 
into the broad light of day. Spain knew that her 
bitterest enemy was again at large; France saw in 
him a friend worth winning; and smaller States, 
such as Denmark and Savoy, had their own reasons 
for regarding with interest the liberated prisoner 
who was a force to be reckoned with. So the man 
who had been the victim of Cecil's jealousy, How- 
ard's diabolical hate, and King James's cowardice, 
stepped out of his prison. 

It is possible to imagine his feelings as he took a 
tour of the town that he had not seen for twelve 
years, and perhaps noted some changes and enjoyed 



the old familiar sights. 



144 



Raleigh Released 

How he must have enjoyed the keen March winds 
blowing invigoratingly on his brow aching from 
over-study and thought; how good once more to 
stretch his limbs, stiff from long confinement, in 
swift walks through London's merry streets and 
along the river banks. He must have wondered 
at the growth and increased beauty of the capital; 
at the Banqueting Hall which Inigo Jones had put 
up in Whitehall (as it stands to-day); at the new 
front in the Strand to his old palace, Durham 
House. Architecturally speaking, London was at 
its zenith in those early Stuart days, with its vistas 
of gables and gardens and stately towers and spires. 

Dress then was beautiful too, the simplest citizen 
in his russet fustian being as artistically clad as 
the lords of the land in their velvet doublets and 
ruffs of fine lace. Sir Walter, no doubt, was arrayed 
in all his wonted bravery^ of pearl-hatbands, 
blazing jewels, silk slashing and trunk hose when 
he took his first walk abroad in the bright chill sun- 
light of March after his long sojourn among the 
shadows and gloomy associations of the Tower. 

Scarcely a week after he had left it he was en- 
grossed in preparations for the coming voyage and 
superintending the building of a ship, aptly named 
* Destiny.' 

1 When he was arrested in 1603, he was carrying £4000 in jewels 
on his bosom. When again in 1618 he was taken prisoner his pockets 
were found full of the diamonds and jacinths which he had wrenched 
off his person. His letters abound with testimony of his passion for 
jewels, velvets and emdroidered damasks. 



145 



CHAPTER XXI: Guiana 
Again 

RALEIGH had always been rather a gam- 
bler and he now cheerfully staked every 
penny of his own and his wife's wrecked 
fortunes on his last great venture. 

Afterward he himself marvelled that he could 
have gone in search of a chimera with such blind 
confidence of success. The mine on the Orinoco 
which was to make everyone concerned in the 
Guiana expedition rich, had never been seen by 
Raleigh, but it was believed that Kemys had been 
shown it by an Indian potentate years before. 
Yet on the possible existence of this mine Raleigh 
readily risked everything. His enthusiasm and 
zeal became contagious. Youths of rank and men 
of distinction volunteered to accompany him in 
large numbers. But unhappily the majority of his 
followers were not made of the right stuff to bear 
great hardships gallantly and to go forward with 
unflinching purpose to their goal — 'drunkards and 
blasphemers,' so they were described to be for the 
most part, and their relatives at home were glad to 
be rid of them. ^ 

^ 'What wonder is it that I failed, being followed by a company 
of volunteers who for the most part had neither seen the sea nor 
the wars, who, some forty gentlemen excepted, were the very 
scum of the world. Drunkards and Blasphemers and such others 
as their friends, fathers and brothers thought it an exceeding good 
gain to be discharged of them with the hazard of some 45 or 50 
pounds, knowing they could not have lived a whole year so cheap 
at home.' — Sir Walter Raleigh in his Apology for the Second 
Voyage to Guiana. 

146 



Guiana Again 

It must be understood that one of the greatest 
changes that had taken place during Raleigh's 
twelve years of imprisonment was the change in the 
relations between England and Spain. Elizabeth 
had proudly disdained Spanish patronage in her 
early days when the nation was divided and her 
throne uncertain. When her position became as- 
sured, and with the help of her ministers — so wisely 
chosen — and her navy, she had made England the 
most powerful and respected of nations, she could 
afford to snap her fingers at the much vaunted 
power of Spain. But James's one desire was to be 
at peace with his predecessor's old enemy; and 
Raleigh, on coming out of the Tower, found that 
truckling to Spain was the order of the day. The 
Spanish Ambassador, Diego Sarmiento, Count of 
Gondomar, was a persona grata at the court, which 
was now forbidden ground to Raleigh. Thus 
Gondomar was admitted to the King's Privy Council, 
and even to his private chamber, a mark of intimacy 
shown to a Spaniard unheard of before, and one 
calculated to horrify those who approved of Queen 
Elizabeth's policy. 

No wonder that the Spanish Ambassador, enjoy- 
ing in such full measure the confidence of James, 
found it no difficult matter to learn from him the 
whole programme that Raleigh had drawn up of 
his scheme and laid before His Majesty, who had 
given his word of honour that it should be kept 
secret. Gondomar was not the ordinary Spanish 
grandee, but a man whose diplomacy was so deep 
and cunning that he could play the coarse buffoon 
to pander to the monarch's taste for coarseness, 

147 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

while all the time he was hoodwinking him and 
getting the King to play into his hands. Gondomar 
kept vigilant watch on all Raleigh's preparations. 
One month after the latter' s release in April 1616, 
he begged for leave of absence, in order to go back 
to Spain to confer with King Philip in person on 
English affairs, especially on 'the formation of 
another company for Guiana and the River Orinoco 
and the prime promoter and originator of which is 
Sir Walter Raleigh, a great seaman who took many 
prizes in the time of Queen Elizabeth, and who 
first colonized Virginia.* Gondomar goes on to 
tell Philip that Raleigh 'sails in October with six or 
eight ships of 200 to 500 tons, some belonging to 
himself, some to his companions, all well provided. 
He will also take launches in which to ascend the 
Orinoco; he is trying to get ships of very light draught 
to take them as high up the river as possible. He 
has already been in the country, and assures people 
that he knows of a mine that will serve all England 
with gold. ' 

The reception of this information in Spain was 
immediately followed by orders for an increase in 
the Spanish navy, for Gondomar declared that 
Raleigh was making the search for a mine a mere 
excuse to injure the alliance between Spain and 
England by carrying on a piratical war against 
Philip. 

Perhaps there were some grounds for Gondomar's 
suspicions. Raleigh represented the old tradition 
of Elizabeth's sea captains that Spain was to be 
flouted and crushed whenever occasion offered, 
either at sea or on land. Any idea of a Spanish 

148 



Guiana Again 

alliance was detestable to him, and his chief article 
of faith was a belief that Englishmen alone had a 
right to set foot in Virginia and Guiana. Raleigh 
found the greatest support for his expedition in 
what remained of the anti-Spanish faction, and 
those who accompanied him were not likely to be 
too gentle and polite toward the Spaniard when 
they came across him poaching on their colonial 
preserves. In spite of James pledging 'his hand, 
word and faith' to Gondomar that, if the Spaniards 
were in any way interfered with, Raleigh should 
pay for it with his life, it was wellnigh inevitable 
that, in such circumstances, there should be conflict 
between the two races. 

It was even suggested that a blow should be 
struck at Spanish interests in Europe by Raleigh's 
ships. Rich Genoa, always on the side of Spain, 
was to be seized and gutted of its wealth. The 
King himself did not frown on this project when it 
came to his ears, yet the plan could never have been 
serious, and was soon abandoned. Nevertheless, 
the adventure of sacking Genoa would have been 
one after Raleigh's own heart and akin to those 
privateering successes for which of old he had won 
such renown, and which he had managed so skilfully 
to combine with more legitimate enterprises. It 
is said that before he started he held conference with 
*some great lords [one of whom was Lord Bacon] 
who told him they doubted he would be prizing if 
he could do it handsomely.' *Yea,' saith he, 
*if I can light right on the plate fleet, you will 
think I were mad if I should refuse it.' To which 
they answered, 'Why, then, you will be a pirate.' 

149 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

'Tush,' quoth he, *my Lord, did you ever hear of 
anyone who was accounted a pirate for taking 
millions ? ' 

A retort very much to the point on the part of 
Raleigh, we cannot help thinking. Yet though he 
might have piratical intentions by the way, he was 
absolutely sincere and firm of purpose about the 
main issue. The commission, which licensed him to 
voyage in those parts of America possessed by 
savage tribes and to bring home * profitable com- 
modities,' was signed in August 1616. In other 
words, he was to work gold mines and bring home 
gold; no other commodity was meant. 

By the following March, Raleigh's ships were in 
the Thames, ready to sail. It was reported to Spain 
by her spies that there were soldiers as well as 
sailors on board, also arms and ammunition. What 
were these for, it was asked, if the Spaniards were 
not to be assailed or their territory encroached 
upon.f* Gondomar was not wrong when he assured 
Xing Philip that such a large armed force must 
entail fighting. He offered Spanish protection to 
Raleigh in working the mine, if he would consent 
to go with only two ships and no military force. 

Naturally, Raleigh refused to be so confiding in 
Spanish honour, and it suited all parties in England 
that he should go in full force, strongly equipped, 
and then to wait to see the course of events on 
his return before exalting or condemning him. 
So the man of resolute purpose, absorbed in his 
dreams of El Dorado ever floating before his eyes, 
was regarded as a pawn in the game of European 
diplomacy. Commander-in-Chief that he was, 

150 



Guiana Again 

holding the King's commission, with power to mete 
out Hfe and death to his subjects at his own dis- 
cretion, Raleigh was still an unpardoned man. 
He was leaving England, as it were, with the halter 
round his neck. With the expenditure of a little 
more money he might have purchased his pardon, 
but not a penny more could he collect, and he 
was advised by such a great lord of legal acumen 
as Bacon that his commission amounted to a 
pardon in itself. Thus he held his life at the Xing's 
pleasure when he set sail on that last disastrous 
voyage. 

Troubles and hindrances of all kinds occurred 
from the outset. Although he left the Thames 
early in April for Plymouth, it was not till the 
middle of August that the real start was made 
from Cork, where Raleigh met Lord Boyle, to whom 
long ago he had sold his vast Irish estates. After 
seven wearisome wind-bound weeks in Cork harbour 
the fleet at last got out to sea again on August 19th. 
The Canaries were reached by September, and the 
ships anchored at Lanzarote on a Sunday. The 
natives had been visited by an invasion of Barbary 
pirates, and mistook the English fleet for Turkish 
ships. They fell on a party which had disembarked 
to forage for provisions, and killed or wounded 
several. Raleigh dared not permit the English- 
men to retaliate and avenge their comrades, and 
quenched their eagerness for hostilities by leav- 
ing the island. He knew that his every move- 
ment was being watched by private enemies, and 
that a skirmish with these people would be pounced 
on as a violation of his promise not to injure any of 

151 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

the King of Spain's dominions. Yet in spite of his 
restraint, one of his captains, Bailey by name, took 
the opportunity of deserting and sailing home; he 
made up a fine story of piratical conduct on his 
admiral's part, too absurd to be credited till after 
the failure of the expedition, when it was brought 
up against Raleigh. Gondomar made capital out 
of the incident already, by urging Philip to have a 
statement drawn up to the effect that an English 
fleet bearing the King's commission had raided the 
Canary Islands. 'Pray,' he wrote, 'send a fleet to 
punish the pirate. Every man caught should at 
once be killed, except Raleigh and the oflficers, who 
should be brought to Seville and executed in the 
Plaza the next day. ' 

Sir Thomas Lake, on King James's behalf, ex- 
pressed great sorrow for ' the atrocious wickedness ' 
of the English behaviour in the Canaries, and con- 
veyed to Gondomar assurances that His Majesty 
was determined against Raleigh, and would join the 
King of Spain in bringing about his ruin, though for 
the present this resolve was to be kept secret. All 
of which demonstrates that James was eager to 
seize the first opportunity of selling his most dis- 
tinguished subject to the Spaniards, and that 
Raleigh's doom was sealed even before the events 
which afterward happened on the Orinoco. 

On September the 4th the explorers touched 
Gomera, another of the Canaries, and here one of 
the few pleasant incidents of the disastrous voyage 
came to pass. 

The governor's wife happened to be half English, 
connected with the family of Stafford, and Raleigh 

152 



Guiana Again 

sent her, by the men who went ashore to obtain a 
supply of water, courteous messages and presents. 
The latter consisted of six fine handkerchiefs and 
six pairs of gloves. The lady of that far-away and 
lonely island was charmed with her handkerchiefs 
and gloves, and returned the attention with gracious 
words and most welcome gifts. *She sent,' wrote 
Raleigh, *four very great loaves of sugar, a basket 
of lemons which I much desired to comfort and 
refresh our very sick men, a basket of oranges, a 
basket of most delicate grapes, another of pome- 
granates and figs, which trifles were better welcome 
to me than 1000 crowns would have been.' 

More presents were dispatched by Raleigh forth- 
with, ' an ounce of delicate extract of amber, a great 
glass of rose water in high estimation here, a very 
excellent picture of Mary Magdalen and a cutwork 
ruff,' and these brought from the generous lady 
*more of refreshing fruit, a basket of fine white 
manchets and two dozen fat hens, with a supply of 
good water.' After this exchange of courtesies the 
island was sacred to Raleigh, and he threatened his 
men with death if they plundered it of a penny- 
worth of anything. 'And we departed without 
any offence given or received to the value of a 
farthing, whereof the Count sent his friar aboard 
my ship with a letter to Don Diego de Sarmiento 
[Gondomar], Ambassador in England, witnessing 
how nobly we had behaved ourselves and how 
justly we had dealt with the inhabitants of the 
island. ' 

That the Ambassador and the King of England 
between them had laid their heads together to 

153 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

undo the greatest seaman alive, whether he did well 
or ill, was of course a fact of which the unsuspecting 
governor of Gomera was in ignorance. 

The island was left with warm expressions of 
kindliness and good-will on both sides. Afterward 
Fortune smiled no more on the luckless voyagers. 
Everything went wrong, gales kept them tossing 
about on the Atlantic for six weeks. Sickness and 
pestilence raged on board, striking down officers 
and men. E,aleigh*s servant, Talbot, died, 'as faith- 
ful and true a man as ever lived. I lost him to my 
inestimable grief,' recorded his unhappy master. 
There was a shortage of water, and the heat was 
intolerable. When the winds dropped a dead calm 
set in and the ships lay motionless as if gripped in a 
vice of molten brass. Next a great darkness, weird 
and horrible, descended on them, lasting two days. 
Forty-two men on the 'Destiny,' of which young 
Walter Raleigh was captain, died, and there were 
hundreds of others suffering torments from thirst 
and plague. Raleigh himself caught a deadly chill, 
for, when roused from his bed by a sudden whirl- 
wind, he rushed on deck to get some air, and in 
another hour he too was prostrate with fever. 

He lay near to death for many weary days. And 
on the 10th of November, when land was sighted 
and was hailed with a rapturous cry by the crews, 
the Admiral was too weak to do more than raise 
himself languidly on his elbow and gaze wistfully 
at the coast for which he yearned. 



154 



CHAPTER XXII: A Chapter 
of Disasters 

RALEIGH'S reception by his old friends the 
Indians was full of reverence and devoted 
cordiality. One or two of the chiefs had 
been with him in England. They all remembered 
how before, when he had come to Guiana, he had 
called their captains together and made them under- 
stand that he was the servant of a Queen who was 
the great 'Cassique' (Lord) of the North, and had 
more ' Cassiques ' under her than there were trees in 
their country; that she was an enemy of the 'Cas- 
tellanos' (Spaniards) because of their tyranny and 
oppression. 

They were not to know how things had changed 
since, how that 'Cassique' had been succeeded by 
another who was no enemy of the *Castellanos,' 
but a King who pandered to them and tolerated 
their tyranny and oppression cheerfully. 

Now they were eager to tend the great sick 
Englishman, and brought him bread, delicious pine- 
apples, fresh fish and meat. He was carried ashore 
in his litter, and away from the pestilential ship he 
was established in a tent, and began to gain strength. 
His men, too, landed and were hospitably enter- 
tained. By one of* his captains, who was invalided 
home, Sir Walter sent a letter to his lady with the 
good news that Guiana's coast had been reached: 

'Sweetheart. I can yet write unto you but with 
a weak hand, for I have suffered the most violent 
calenture for fifteen days that ever man did, and 
lived: but God that gave me strong heart in all my 

155 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

adversities hath also now strengthened it in the 
hell-fire of heat. We have had two most grievous 
sicknesses in our ship, of which forty-two have died 
and there are yet many sick, but having recovered 
the land of Guiana this 12th of November I hope 
we shall recover them. We are yet 200 men, and 
the rest of our fleet are reasonably strong — strong 
enough I hope to perform what we have undertaken, 
if the diligent care at London to make our strength 
known to the Spanish King by his Ambassador hath 
not taught the Spaniards to fortify all the entrances 
against us. Howsoever we must make the adven- 
ture and if we perish it shall be no honour for Eng- 
land, nor gain for his Majesty to loose, among many 
other, one hundred as valiant gentlemen as England 
hath in it.' And Raleigh adds with pride that 
though it would be * a vanitie to say that he might 
be King of the Indians,' his name has lived among 
them. *They feed me with fresh meat and all that 
the country yields; all offer to obey me.' 

Before the expedition had started to find the 
mine, many of the men showed signs of sullen dis- 
content. Raleigh's exhausted state from illness 
made his leadership of the river excursion out of 
the question, besides his presence with the fleet was 
necessary, so it was agreed he should stay behind at 
Trinidad with the five large ships, while Kemys, with 
the ^mall vessels, guided the rest up the Orinoco. 

Raleigh's lieutenant. Sir Wareham St Leger, was 
also detained at Trinidad by sickness, and his place 
was taken by Sir Walter's nephew, George Raleigh. 
The land forces were under the command of young 
Walter Raleigh, the son so often affectionately re- 

156 



t 




-HE WAS CARRIED ASHORE IN HIS hlTTKK "-Page 155 



A Chapter of Disasters 

,f erred to as 'little Wat' in his parents' letters. He 
had been sent to Oxford at fourteen, and inherited 
much of his father's culture and adventurous 
spirit. 

There could be no disguising the fact that the 
enterprise was fraught with grave risks. There was 
a Spanish settlement somewhere in Guiana though 
none could exactly localize it, and this made en- 
counters with the Spaniards inevitable sooner or 
later. Soldiers and sailors to the number of 400 
escorted the party as a preparation for all con- 
tingencies. It was hoped, however, to get to the 
mine without a fight. 

The river expedition departed on December 10th, 
and their instructions were that they were to make 
for the mine and avoid a conflict with the Spaniards, 
if possible. 

The soldiers were to encamp between the Spanish 
town (if there was one) and the mine. *If the 
Spaniards make war on you,' Raleigh said, *you are 
to repel them if it be in your power and drive them 
as far as you can. ' 

Kemys had orders that, should the mine not 
prove as rich as was hoped and be hardly worth 
keeping, he was only to carry away a few samples 
of ore as proof that the design of working it had 
been genuine. They were to be cautious in landing, 
*for with the exception of a few gentlemen,' wrote 
Raleigh, * I know what a scum of men you have and 
I would not for all the world receive a blow from 
the Spaniards to the dishonour of our nation.' 

By the 31st the party of explorers had reached 
the town of San Thome, which had been built by 

157 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

the Spanish settlers on the banks of the river. Here 
they landed on New Year's Day to rest the night 
before starting for the mine. According to Raleigh's 
account but not that of the Spaniards, an ambus- 
cade was led against them at nine o'clock in the 
evening by a Captain Geronimo de Grados, and the 
English, whose rank and file were useless, were 
fallen upon after dark, and after being cast into 
confusion, rallied suflSciently to repulse the enemy. 
They pursued them to the town, and here the fight- 
ing was resumed. In the fray young Walter Raleigh 
lost his life. He was felled to the earth by the butt- 
end of a Spanish musket after an exhibition of 
dare-devil bravery. 

When the town, consisting as it did of 130 poor 
palm-leaf huts, had fallen, the Spaniards retired to 
an island near, whence they kept up a desultory 
fire. Somehow or other a week was allowed to 
elapse before any movement was made in the direc- 
tion of the mine, which, if Kemys's calculations 
were right, could only have been eight miles distant. 
The spirits of the men wavered when 250 were shot 
by the Spaniards lying in ambush, and they grum- 
bled and cursed the unfortunate Kemys, who was 
also steadily losing heart. Then the Indians 
brought news of Spanish reinforcements on their 
way up the river, and there was nothing to be done 
but to reimbark the dwindled forces and to drift 
down with the swift current of the river back to 
Trinidad, with a tale of failure that broke the heart 
of the man who had staked all that was dearest to 
him in life on its success. 

Before they left San Thome all the English soldiers 

158 



A Chapter of Disasters 

assembled under arms for young Raleigh's burial, 
and with reversed muskets, trailed pikes and muffled 
drums, laid him near the high altar in the Church 
of St Thomas. 

Poor Kemys was bitterly reproached when he 
came to Raleigh on March 2nd bringing no sheaves 
with him, but only a miserable story of reverses. 

*I told him that, seeing my son was lost, I cared 
not if he had lost a hundred more in opening the 
mine so my credit had been saved. What shall 
become of me now, I know not. I am unpardoned 
in England, and my poor estate consumed, and 
whether any other State or prince will give me 
bread I know not. ' 

Kemys, who had been his true and devoted 
servant since boyhood, never faltering in his loyalty, 
and in whom Raleigh had placed implicit trust and 
confidence, so took to heart his master's reproaches 
that he soon after committed suicide in his cabin. 

No wonder Raleigh wrote in his most pathetic 
letter to his wife, telling her of their boy's death, 
' my brains are broken. ' 

*I was loth to write,' the letter ran, 'because I 
knew not how to comfort you; and God knows I 
never knew what sorrow meant till now. Comfort 
you heart, dearest Besse, I shall sorrow for us both. 
. . . The Lord bless and comfort you that you 
may bear patiently the death of so valiant a son. ' 

Then in a long postscript he tells her the whole 
story of Kemys's expedition and its failure. 

* There never was a poor man so exposed to 
slaughter as I was,' he ends. *My brains are 
broken and I cannot write much . . . ' 

159 



Sir W^aher Raleigh 

' Whitney, for whom I sold my plate at Plymouth, 
and to whom I gave more credit than all my cap- 
tains, ran from me at the Grenadas, and Wollaston 
with him, so as I am now but five ships, and one of 
those I have sent home with a rabble of idle rascals 
in her which I know will not spare to wound me, 
but I care not. I am sure there is never a base 
slave in the fleet hath taken the pains and care I 
have done, hath slept so little and hath travailed so 
much. My friends will not believe them and for 
the rest I care not. ' 

Raleigh's bitterness and self-pity were not with- 
out cause. Many of his men were mutinous, two 
of his captains had deserted and wanted to turn 
pirates for their own advantage. 

Another attack on Guiana in these circumstances 
was out of the question, and in depths of despond- 
ency he finally set sail for England. 

Lord Arundel and the Earl of Pembroke had 
stood surety for him, and Raleigh would not betray 
their trust. * I have brought myself and my ship to 
England ... at the manifest peril of my life . . . 
for even death itself shall not make me turn thief 
and vagabond nor will I ever betray the noble 
courtesy of the several gentlemen who gave sureties 
for me.' 

He arrived at Plymouth in the 'Destiny,' on the 
21st of June. His state of mind was one of utter 
despair. He had failed in what he had pledged his 
life to perform, and, contrary to the conditions im- 
posed upon him, had molested a Spanish settlement 
and embroiled English soldiers with those of Spain. 
The whole undertaking had been hopeless from 

160 



A Chapter of Disasters 

start to finish, a buccaneering venture which only 
success could have saved from the world's censure. 

Slowly and surely Gondomar, the crafty, relent- 
less ambassador, had completed his deep-laid 
schemes of removing the one great survivor of the 
old violent animosity between the two leading 
nations of Europe. And now at his bidding the 
King of England was ready to condemn, unheard, 
the most brilliant and distinguished Englishman of 
his time. 

*They have sent to arrest Raleigh and his ships 
at Plymouth,' Gondomar wrote in his secret dis- 
patches to Philip. *If he has brought anything of 
value it is sure to have been stolen, but I am told 
he has nothing but some tobacco and a dish and 
ewer of silver gilt. It is certain Raleigh will try to 
excuse himself by saying that everything has been 
done without his orders, and thus cast the blame 
upon the dead as he and his friends are already 
doing. But withal the living bring the plunder, and 
I think everything possible is being done here in 
your Majesty's interest to bring them no signal 
punishment and restitution. The King gave me 
his faith, his hand, and his word that if Raleigh 
dared so much as to look upon any of your Majesty's 
territories or vassals, even if he brought back his 
ships loaded with gold, he would hand all of them 
with Raleigh himself to your Majesty that you 
might hang him in the Plaza of Madrid. Now that 
the time has come for fulfilment, and I have 
reminded him of it, his Majesty has promised that 
he will do it as soon as a judicial examination proves 
the excesses to have been committed ... he has 

161 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

sent Buckingham and Digby to me to say that 
Raleigh shall be punished with the utmost severity; 
. . . that Raleigh's friends and all England shall 
not save him from the gallows. ' 

Gondomar boasted that, since he came to London 
as ambassador, he had shown the English that he 
was disinclined to suffer any slights, either person- 
ally or directed against his country. In a private 
conversation with James, Gondomar asked him 
what he would think if a Spanish fleet were to make 
the same hostile entry into the ports of Scotland or 
Ireland as his ships under Raleigh had done on their 
way to the Orinoco. The King replied that he had 
* spoken very well,' and cited an excellent example. 
Raleigh he pronounced ' a thief, ' and said there was 
no excuse for him. However, the Ambassador felt 
that, in spite of the King's assurances, if justice 
were to be done, his Majesty would require some 
reminder to carry it out. 

*Even if the King hang Raleigh,' he wrote to his 
master, *and restores the plunder, I should grieve 
that your Majesty should be satisfied with this for 
so atrocious a wickedness. . . . Perhaps such an 
opportunity will never occur again of asserting 
ourselves and giving them a lesson. I told the 
King and Council that Your Majesty's goodness 
might lead you to pardon offences against yourself, 
but conscience will not allow you to forgive injiu*ies 
against your subjects.' 

Raleigh's misdemeanours were thus monstrously 
exaggerated to alarm the King of England, and to 
serve as an object lesson to teach Europe how sub- 
missively that monarch could be made bow to Spain. 

162 



CHAPTERXXIII: Gondomar's 
Letters 

NOTHING can give a clearer notion of the 
way in which Sir Walter Raleigh was 
sacrificed to Spain, than the letters 
(already quoted) of the Ambassador, who was so 
set on hounding him to his death. 

We owe the discovery of many of these facts to the 
diligent researches made by Major Martin A. S. 
Hume in the Palace Library of Madrid and at 
Samancas, where these documents, so filled with 
venomous spite, have been preserved. Yet it was 
not for private revenge, as Mr Hume points out, 
or for the actual sins of the last attempt on Guiana, 
that Gondomar pursued this persistent course of 
malice, but to impress indelibly upon England that 
Spain, and Spain alone, should hold sway in South 
America. 

The story of Raleigh's eventful life at this point 
where it is nearing its end cannot be better told than 
in giving further extracts from these letters, in 
which brutal boasts and threats are veiled with 
scarcely a shred of diplomatic reticence. 

On the 14th of June the Ambassador wrote, saying 
that he had always urged upon James the mistake 
of letting Raleigh sail with so many ships, which 
could only mean the robbery and devastation of 
Spanish territory. 

*I urged that prevention was much better than 
cure, whereupon your Majesty replied that you 
would insist upon due sureties being given that 
Raleigh should do no harm. I wrote this to my 

163 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

King who, in accordance with this assurance re- 
frained from sending out his fleet to oppose Raleigh 
notwithstanding that he was informed by others 
of the evil intentions of the latter. We know now 
that Raleigh assailed the Canaries and attacked 
towns in Guiana, burning churches and committing 
irreparable damage. Captain Bailey left him when 
he saw what he was about . . . prompt and severe 
public action should now be taken against Raleigh in 
order that my master should see by Your Majesty's 
acts that you are really desirous of his friendship.' 

On June 20th, when Raleigh had reached Ply- 
mouth, the Ambassador writes again: 

* Raleigh has arrived with all the property he has 
seized from my master's subjects. I do not call it 
stolen, or him a pirate because, as he returns so 
confidently to an English port, after all I said to 
your Majesty to prevent his sailing, it is evident 
that those who told my King that Raleigh was going 
as commander of your Majesty's Fleet for the 
purpose of waylaying and plundering the Spanish 
Flotilla and conquering my master's territories will 
persist in their opinion. 

*His Catholic Majesty will certainly see that 
when I persuaded him that Raleigh would do no 
harm I was deceived — for the facts are notoriously 
otherwise. Your Majesty has so good a memory 
that you will not forget your "faith, hand and word" 
pledged to me. Walter Raleigh has robbed, sacked 
and burnt and murdered Spanish subjects and has 
brought back enough wealth to make him and his 
supporters rich. Justice demands that Raleigh and 
all his companions shall be hanged directly they set 

164 



Gondomar^ s Letters 

one foot on English soil, without waiting for them 
to set the other foot. I am quite sure the King my 
master would treat any of his vassals so if they had 
commenced this rupture.' 

Even more plainly did Gondomar speak when he 
paid farewell visits to James before his intended 
departure for Madrid. This Herod and Pilate 
embraced and pressed hands, and James remarked 
that, *so far as greatness was concerned,' the King 
of Spain was greater of course than all the rest of 
Christian kings put together. 

* When I thanked him he seized my hand, held it, 
pressing it in his, saying that never in public or 
private would he do or even think anything against 
Your Majesty, but would in all things strive to 
avoid evil to you. He had, he said, quite banished 
piracy, and for the last two years no one had dared 
to bring to England property seized from Spaniards. 
In talk the King admitted that if Your Majesty 
would be his friend he needed nothing else.' 

On the 16th of July Gondomar wrote to King of 
Spain, describing interviews in which Raleigh's fate 
was sealed: 

*I had taken leave of the King and was about to 
set out for Spain when, in accordance with Your 
Majesty's orders, I deferred my departure and sent 
to ask for another audience. 

*The King sent to say that, on Monday Snd, he 
would expect me at Greenwich. I thought I had 
better see the Council first and tackle them, so I 
conferred with Buckingham who ordered them in 
the King's name to give me audience. ... I fixed 
%N^ o'clock on the ^9th of June; and on my arrival 

165 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

all the Councillors came out to meet me, the Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury saying that they had sus- 
pended all their business and willingly attended 
my orders.' 

This gave Gondomar his chance of enlarging on 
Raleigh's crimes. He enumerated the * murders, 
sackings, pillage and burnings' of which he was 
guilty, 'such as were never seen in time of war.' 
He said how offended the King of Spain was at 
such insolence. Once more he repeated the King's 
pledge on * faith, hand and word,' to surrender 
Raleigh and his companions to be hanged in the 
Plaza of Madrid. 

There were friends of Raleigh's in the Council 
who were indignant at the arrogant attitude the 
Spanish Ambassador had assumed. They said he 
dared to use expressions such as no king or council 
of England had ever allowed before from a foreign 
ambassador. They objected to his calling the King 
to account for Raleigh's acts, and saying that he had 
promised to hand him over, if he did anything to 
offend Spain, to be hanged in Madrid; just as if Eng- 
land, forsooth, were tributary to the King of Spain. 

Gondomar told the Council that Philip had no 
need of the King of England's friendship, and in 
future would guard his own prestige and the safety 
of his subjects' lives and property. 

Bacon made answer for himself and fellow-coun- 
cillors that they were all very sorry, but the King 
should not be held responsible for the excesses of a 
private person. 

The King would fulfil his promise and give full 
satisfaction. He had publicly condemned Raleigh's 

166 



Gondomar'^ 5 Letters 

proceedings and had arrested him and his ships as 
soon as he came back. The Archbishop, 'doffing 
his bonnet,' said that Raleigh's proceedings certainly 
deserved punishment. Another special Council 
was held by James at Greenwich, and the general 
conclusion arrived at was that ample compensation 
should be given to Spain, and Raleigh and his com- 
panions severely punished. 

The next afternoon, Gondomar was rowed down 
the river to Greenwich Palace, and swaggered gaily 
into the King's Chamber: he next was duly em- 
braced by the King, and when the doors were closed 
Gondomar further denounced Raleigh, and James 
became very humble and apologetic. Gondomar 
had been a true prophet, he said, and he, the King, 
had been deceived. He had always doubted the 
existence of a mine, but he never could have believed 
that such crimes as Raleigh's could have been 
committed. When Gondomar said that the time 
was past for inquiries and delays, that Raleigh 
should be hanged at once, the King made a feint of 
being outraged. He snatched off his hat, tore his 
hair, and said if that was Spain's idea of justice, 
it was not England's. He never had and never 
would, with God's help, allow a man to be con- 
demned unheard in his own defence without a 
proper trial. 

Of course, Gondomar admitted, the laws of Spain 
and England differed, for such men would have 
been punished in Spain without all this discussion 
and procrastination. What had the King of Spain 
not done for James, and now he took the part of a 
pirate against his friend? 

167 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

Gondomar had told him the plain truth, but 
since this was of no avail, his King would doubtless 
take the matter into his own hands and defend the 
honour of Spain. This threat of war alarmed King 
James, and he begged the Ambassador to send his 
pledge of peace to Spain that same night. He 
promised to arrange for the Council to meet the 
following Wednesday and decide upon Raleigh's 
sentence, which he vowed should be carried out 
without delay. Gondomar, when he dispatched 
the report of this interview to Philip, did not attempt 
to conceal his exultation at the * prestige' it would 
give Spain for the King of England to hand over 
one of his subjects to be punished in a foreign 
country. He left the King's presence in high delight 
and took a walk in the gardens with the Duke of 
Lennox. The King sent after him a basket of 
cherries, which he ate as he went along, and the 
frivolous King, looking out of the window, called 
out in fits of laughter. *A dignified ambassador 
indeed, eating cherries out of a basket. ' 

Thus with a noble life hanging in the balance 
could King James lightly bandy jokes. At the 
next meeting of the Council there was strong op- 
position taken to the step of sending Raleigh to be 
hanged in Spain. But James said his promise was 
given and he could not break it. Carew, Raleigh's 
loyal kinsman, prayed on his knees that Raleigh 
should not be condemned unheard. Bacon, though 
he was not a friend of Raleigh's, tried to dissuade 
the King from the humiliation of handing him over 
to the Spaniards. He suggested that James had 
made the promise rashly without intending it to be 

168 



Gondomar^ s Letters 

accepted literally, a suggestion which greatly angered 
the King. He declared he had meant what he said 
and would carry it out. 

Again he and the Ambassador met, this time on 
more affectionate terms than before. Gondomar 
offered to write the dispatch in answer to the King 
of Spain's by James's dictation. But when it was 
written, Gondomar declared it was not strong 
enough, and must be written over again in more 
explicit terms. When James hesitated Gondomar 
began to bully him into agreeing to send Raleigh 
and the others to Spain in the 'Destiny.' 

Satisfied with this humiliating pledge, which was 
confirmed by a letter to the King of Spain from 
the Duke of Buckingham, who was said to be 
more Spanish than a Spaniard in his sympathies, 
Gondomar departed for Madrid. 

All this time Raleigh was under arrest at Ply- 
mouth. He might have gone to France and sold 
himself to the service of Richelieu and the French 
King, but he was honourable enough to return and 
so invited capture. Vice-Admiral Sir Lewis Stuke- 
ley of Devon, related to him by blood, was appointed 
to bring him to London. Raleigh had been met by 
his faithful Bess, and, with one of his devoted fol- 
lowers, Captain King, was winding up his affairs at 
Plymouth. Stukeley at first proved so casual a 
jailor that Raleigh might still have slipped over to 
France in a French vessel that lay in the Sound, yet 
he resisted the temptation. Maybe that hope 
revived and his indomitable spirit made a last 
rebound at the thought that a future of peace and 
honour at home might still be in store for him. 

169 



CHAPTER XXIV: Raleigh de- 
fends himself in Letters to Lord 

Carew 

ON the 21st of June 1618, Raleigh wrote 
from Plymouth to his kinsman, Lord 
Carew, an important letter containing his 
version of what had happened. He was eager that 
the statement should be laid before the Lords of the 
Council as soon as possible, in order that his friends 
might make a motion in his favour. 

He ^ begins by referring to a previous letter which 
he had written to Mr Secretary Winwood, who 
had died since he had received it, and continues as 
follows : 

'By that letter your Lordship will have learnt 
the reasons given by Kemys for not discovering 
the mine, which could have been done, notwith- 
standing his obstinacy, by means of the cacique 
of the country, an old acquaintance of mine, if the 

1 RALEIGH'S LETTER TO MR SECRETARY WINWOOD 

Sir, — Since the death of Kemys it is considered by the Sergeant- 
Major and others of his inward friends, that he told them he could 
have brought them into the mine within two hours march from 
the riverside; but because my son was slain, myself unpardoned 
and not like to live, he had no reason to open the mine either for 
the Spaniard or the King. They answered that the King (though 
I were not pardoned) had granted me my heart's desire under the 
Great Seal. He replied that the grant to me was as to a man non 
eus in the law, and therefore of no force. But when I was resolved 
to write to yr. Honour, he prayed me to join with him in excusing 
him for not going to the mine. I answered him I would not do it, 
but if he himself could satisfy the King and State that he had 
reason not to open it I should be glad of it . . . but for my part 

170 



Raleigh defends himself 

companies had remained in the river two days 
longer; inasmuch as the cacique offered pledges 
to do it. The servant of the Governor, moreover, 
who is now with me, could have led them to two 
gold mines not two leagues distant from the town, 
as well as to a silver mine at not more than three 
harquebuss shots distant, and I will make this truth 
manifest when my health allows me to go to London. 
As for the rest, if Whitney and Wollaston had not 
gone from me to the Granadas, and the rest had not 
abandoned me. ... I would have returned from 
Newfoundland to Guiana and would have died there 
or fulfilled my undertaking. When I saw that they 
had deserted me I resolved to steer for Newfound- 
land to take in water and clean the ship. * He then 
relates the story of the mutiny, of how the men 
resisted and shouted and said they would rather die 
than return to England; and how they took pos- 
session of the magazine, armour and swords and 
tried to intimidate him into turning pirate. *I 
answered that even if I were a beggar I would not 
be a robber or do anything base, nor would I abuse 
the confidence and commission of the King. I am 
well aware that with my ship, than which in the 
world there is no better, I could have enriched 

I must avow that he might without loss have done it. He told me 
that he would wait on me presently and give me better satisfaction. 
But I was no sooner come for him unto my cabin when I heard a 
pistol go off over my head, and sending to know who shot it, 
word was brought to me that Kemys shot it out of his cabin 
window to clean it, and his boy going into the cabin found him 
lying upon his bed with much blood upon him, and looking in his 
face saw him dead. The pistol did but crack his rib, but he found 
a long knife in his body. 

171 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

myself to 100,000 in the space of three months and 
could have collected a company which would have 
impeded the traffic of Europe. But those who have 
told the King that I had feigned the mine and really 
intended to turn Corsair, are really mistaken in 
their malice, for after failing in the discovery of the 
mine, by fault of another, and after having lost my 
estate and my son and being without pardon for 
myself or security for my life, I have held it all as 
nought, and offer myself to His Majesty to do with 
me as he will without making any terms. As for 
the mutineers the greatest number of them fled from 
me in Ireland. . . . Since my arrival in Ireland I 
have been told that I have fallen into the grave 
displeasure of His Majesty for having taken a town 
in Guiana which was in the possession of Spaniards. 
When my men heard this, they were so afraid of 
being hanged that they were on the point of making 
me sail away again by force. With regard to taking 
the town, although I gave no authority for it to be 
done, it was impossible to avoid it, because when the 
English were landed at night . . . the Spaniards 
attacked them with the intention of destroying 
them, killing several and wounding many. ... It 
was in the entrance of the town my son was killed. 
. . . And my Lord, that Guiana be Spanish 
territory can never be acknowledged, for I myself 
took possession of it for the Queen of England by 
virtue of a session of all the native chiefs of the 
country. His Majesty knows this to be true, as is 
proved by the concession granted by him under the 
Great Seal of England to Harcourt. ... It will 
thus be seen that His Majesty, in any case, has a 

172 



Raleigh defends himself 

better right and title than anyone. I heard in 
Ireland that my enemies have declared that it was 
my intention to turn Corsair and fly, but at the 
manifest peril of my life I have brought myself and 
my ship to England. I have suffered as many 
miseries as it was possible for me to suffer, which 
I could not have endured if God had not given me 
strength. If His Majesty wishes that I should 
suffer even more, let God's will be done, for even 
Death itself shall not make me turn thief or vaga- 
bond, nor will I ever betray the noble courtesy of 
the several gentlemen who gave sureties for me. — 
Your poor Kinsman, W. Raleigh. 

^Postscri'pt. — I beg you will excuse me to my 
lords for not writing to them, because want of 
sleep for fear of being surprised in my cabin at night 
has almost deprived me of my sight, and some return 
of the pleurisy which I had in the Tower has so 
weakened my hand that I cannot hold the pen — 21st 
June 1618.' 

The letter is given here in full, because it contains 
Raleigh's principal points of defence, and makes 
clear much that would otherwise be difficult to 
understand with regard to his actions. It also 
shows that he was not fully aware of his hazardous 
position. Before he had sent off this letter he 
learned in some way what charges were to be made 
against him by the officers who had deserted, and 
enclosed another letter under the same cover in 
which he replies to them one by one. 

He emphatically denies that he wasted time at 
Plymouth before the outward voyage, and that he 
received any other provisions in the Canaries be- 

173 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

sides *a basket of oranges and three loaves of sugar' 
sent by the Countess of Gomera. 

As to the accusation that he intended to abandon 
his country and bring those under him into trouble, 
he urges that, as far as his accusers were concerned, 
he could have done it with their consent, and that his 
having come back to cast himself on His Majesty's 
mercy was sufficient proof of his good faith. 

* I hope to live to answer them to their faces, ' he 
wrote, *and prove them all to be cowards and liars 
and in spirit thieves. I write this after having 
sealed the other letters, and I pray you give a copy 
to my poor wife who, with the death of her son and 
these rumours, I fear will go mad. I forgot to 
answer the third article, in which they accuse me 
of having sacked the town before seeking the mine. 
. . . With regard to their most impudent assertion 
that the entering of the town and the burning of the 
houses was contrary to all my promises and pro- 
testations, I shall be content to suffer death if I 
had any part or knowledge whatever of the burning 
or sacking. I know nothing about it. . . . ' This 
was indeed true, Raleigh was many miles away from 
the exploring expedition when it took the ill-fated 
step of attacking San Thome, the one spot of 
Guiana which the Spaniards could call their own 
under any sort of protest. Had he been actually in 
command he would no doubt have advised some 
other place for landing, and one of the two main 
charges against him, i.e, that he had attacked a 
territory already in possession of the Spaniards 
could never have been made. But as we have seen 
from the correspondence of the Spanish Ambassador 

174 



Raleigh defends himself 

with the Kings of England and Spain, Raleigh's 
doom had been sealed before he even set foot in 
Guiana. What else could King James have meant 
when he gave his promise upon his 'faith, hand and 
word' to send Raleigh to be hanged in Madrid if he 
*even so much as looked upon the territories or 
subjects of the King of Spain.' What is more, a 
scheme had been laid by Gondomar from the begin- 
ning that English and Spaniards should be em- 
broiled, and that the conflict between the two should 
serve as an excuse for the fulfilment of the King's 
promise. Confident that the adventurers would 
have as much severity exercised toward them as if 
they had done the 'like spoil in any of the cities of 
England' in having obtained King James's pledge 
to that effect, Gondomar had departed for Spain 
a few days after the arrival of Raleigh in the 
* Destiny' at Plymouth. While the doomed man 
was still on the high seas, James had issued a proc- 
lamation denouncing the affair of San Thome as 
scandalous. He declared his detestation of the 
said insolences, and urged all his subjects to give 
evidence in the matter in order that the guilty 
should be brought to punishment. We shall now 
see what that punishment was to be and how it was 
met by Raleigh. 



175 



CHAPTER XXV: Betrayal 

ON July 25th the journey of Sir Walter to 
London in the custody of Stukeley began. 
The party consisted of himself, Lady 
Raleigh and servants. King, his loyal captain, and 
a Frenchman, a quack doctor called Manourie, 
whom Raleigh suspected of being a spy though he 
put faith in his medical skill. Manourie made 
mischief between Raleigh and his gaoler by repeat- 
ing remarks that he let fall by the way, such as 
when they rode by his beloved home, Sherborne 
Park, his exclaiming, 'All this was mine and it was 
taken from me unjustly. ' 

They baited and lodged at * divers gentlemen's 
houses' upon the road; and hearing from some of 
the hosts of the storm brewing against him at court, 
Raleigh began to regret that he had not taken 
advantage of the opportunity which offered itself 
at Plymouth to make an escape to France, and 
confided to King his desire to accomplish it in some 
other way. They came to Salisbury by way of 
Wilton on July 27th, and here Raleigh acted one of 
those parts altogether unworthy of that side of his 
character which we have learned to admire. He 
feigned sickness, and the French quack dressed 
him for the role of malingerer. Manourie declared 
that he asked him to mix him a powerful emetic 
in order to * evacuate bad humours' and to gain 
* time to work my friends and order my affairs, per- 
haps even to pacify His Majesty.' The King was 
on his summer progress, and in its course was to 
stay at Salisbury, and Raleigh counted on meeting 

176 



Betrayal 

him there, and throwing himself on his mercy. Lady 
Raleigh and her retinue, with the faithful Captain 
King, proceeded to London, leaving Raleigh at 
Salisbury to be ministered to by Bishop Andrew's 
physicians, who were greatly puzzled by his strange 
malady. For four days he was invalided, living 
on a smuggled leg of mutton, and writing his rapid 
and effective Apology for the Voyage to Guiana, 
Manourie acted as his amanuensis, and copied the 
manuscript and accepted money from Raleigh for 
his pains. As soon as the treatise was written, 
Raleigh recovered. He was apparently not in the 
least ashamed of the deception he had practised, 
and justified it in his last speech by citing the 
example of David. 'David did make himself a fool 
and suffered spittle to fall upon his beard that he 
might escape the hands of his enemies.' 

The King arrived at Salisbury on August 1st, 
and whether or not Raleigh succeeded in bringing 
his Apology to his notice, the only result seems to 
have been that a royal command was issued for 
the prisoner's immediate removal to London. 

The eagerness of France to provide so distin- 
guished a fugitive as Raleigh with a refuge was 
demonstrated at Brentford when a French gentle- 
man managed to get speech with him and advised 
him that Le Clerc, a French agent in London, had 
something of importance to communicate to him. 
On reaching London, where he was permitted at 
first to stay in his wife's house in Broad Street, Le 
Clerc called on him and said arrangements for his 
escape had been made and a ship was waiting to take 
him across the Channel. But as King had also a 

177 



Sir TFalter Raleigh 

plan in mind, Raleigh naturally preferred to trust 
himself to his old servant rather than to foreign 
hands. Not suspecting the treachery of his base 
kinsman, Stukeley, who had procured a warrant 
authorizing him to connive at and appear to be 
shutting his eyes to Raleigh's intended flight, he 
repaired on Sunday night, August 9th, to the boat 
King had got in readiness, with two wherries, at the 
Tower Dock. He had put on a green hatband and 
a false beard, and was accompanied by Sir Lewis 
Stukeley and his son as a page of his own. * Under 
the visor of friendship' Stukeley played his double 
game, pretending the liveliest interest in the plans 
for Raleigh's escape while all the time he was keep- 
ing the authorities well posted up in every move. 
He saluted Captain King as he was entering the 
boat, and asked him if he had not behaved like an 
honest man, to which King responded with grim 
evasion that he hoped he would continue so. The 
oarsmen had scarcely rowed twenty strokes when 
they became nervous and complained of another 
boat following them. Raleigh's suspicions were 
raised, but Stukeley endeavoured to reassure him, 
and then 'cursed and damned himself for venturing 
his fortunes with a runaway who had so little trust 
and confidence in his guidance. Persuaded thus 
that there was no cause for alarm they proceeded, 
and not till Woolwich was passed did Raleigh's fears 
reawaken. Now all Stukeley 's reassurances and 
embraces failed to convince him, and on coming to 
Plumstead he gave the men orders to turn round. 
They came face to face with the pursuing boat, and 
the captive saw that the game was up, but he still 

178 




'HE SALUTED CAPTAIN KING AS HE WAS ENTEKING THE 
BOAT"— Page 17S 



Betrayal 

did not realize the treachery of Stukeley, who em- 
braced him and suggested ways of securing his 
safety. But on landing at Greenwich the traitor 
threw off the mask, which he had worn with such 
Judas-like deception, and handed over his prisoner 
to men from the other boat. Then it was that 
Raleigh uttered in the hearing of King the single 
reproach, * Sir Lewis, these actions will not turn out 
to your credit.' Prophetic words, for this traitor 
was discovered later 'clipping the gold' bestowed on 
him as purchase money for his treachery, and retired 
to the lonely wind-swept Isle of Lundy, in the 
waters of the Severn, where he died, raving mad, 
his name held in everlasting odium and execrated 
by all. 

Captain King, staunch and loyal to the last, left 
his master only at the Tower gates ' to the tuition of 
ffim,' he said afterward, 'with Whom I do not 
doubt that his soul resteth.' 

Once more Sir Walter passed in through the 
gloomy portals of the prison house with which he 
was so sadly familiar, from which he had emerged 
with his face 'towards the sunset' full of new hopes 
and faith in the success of his mission a year or two 
before. And now all the learned lawyers and judges 
of the realm cudgelled their brains as to how some 
plausible legal pretext was to be found for bringing 
Raleigh to the block. 

In Madrid a council of Dons had met and come 
to the decision that, after all, it was advisable the 
execution should take place in London and not in 
Spain. A foreign tribunal therefore condemned 
him before even the semblance of a trial had been 

179 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

gone through at home. His death was a foregone 
conclusion, but the way in which it was to be com- 
passed was still debatable. 

The condemnation at Winchester fifteen years 
earlier was to serve as the nominal cause of his 
destruction, but it was necessary to trump up 
additional reasons. The Privy Council did all in 
their power by constant cross-questioning to wring 
admissions of guilt from Raleigh. It was not 
sufficient to charge him with piratical intentions 
which could not be proved, or to make capital out 
of his negotiations with France. There only re- 
mained the questionable conduct of the expedition 
and his collision with Spanish subjects. 

Nothing could shake Raleigh's firmness with 
regard to the incidents of the voyage. He affirmed 
unhesitatingly that San Thome was not counted a 
Spanish possession, because he himself had annexed 
it in 1595, a fact which the Queen had recognized 
by granting Harcourt and himself patents. 

The whole autumn was spent in these futile 
arguments, and at one time even bets were being 
laid at court that Sir Walter Raleigh would in the 
end get off with his life. His friend, Queen Anne, 
pleaded for him earnestly from a bed of sickness. 
Vain pleadings these, for she had lost long since any 
influence she may ever have had on her callous, 
coarse-minded husband. Even Buckingham, it was 
said, was in favour of his life being spared, but 
though kingly promises, as a rule, might be broken 
with impunity, a promise made to Spain was 
apparently sacred and James intended to keep it. 



180 



CHAPTER XXVI: The End 

TRIAL by jury in Raleigh's case was said 
to be legally out of the question, because 
his sentence to death at Winchester still 
held good, and for civil purposes he was already 
practically dead. It was therefore proposed that 
the Council should sit in secret and discuss whether 
the prisoner should be brought up under Habeas 
Corpus before the King's Bench. This was the 
course finally decided upon, and the warrant issued 
with the great seal affixed on * October 24th.' 

Ill and utterly disheartened as he was, Raleigh 
had been able to withstand the machinations of his 
last keeper. Sir Thomas Wilson, who had been put 
in charge of him with the express purpose of spying 
on him, by winning his confidence. This person, 
distinguished for having performed many services 
of a like nature, tried to ingratiate himself with the 
prisoner so as to trap him, during familiar converse, 
into making admissions which could be used as 
evidence against him. Wilson intercepted his letters 
to Lady Raleigh, and promised him his sovereign's 
pardon if he would tell all he knew, but all these 
measures were useless, for Raleigh still repudiated 
the *new crimes' attributed to him. He had 
never intended to be a pirate; never * sought for 
a Commission from France nor ever had any,' and 
to these statements he adhered. 

He was roused out of his sleep early on the 
morning of the 28th, shivering from an ague and 
burning with fever. They took him in this con- 
dition from the Tower to appear before the King's 
Bench in Westminster Hall, and as he passed 

181 



Sir TFalter Raleigh 

through the draughty corridors an old retainer drew 
attention to the fact that he had not combed his 
thick grey curls. 'Let them kam it that have it/ he 
answered, and then, to bring a smile to the old ser- 
vant's woeful face, he added, * Peter, dost thou know 
of any plaister to set a man's head on again when it 
is off?' 

On his arrival before the judges, Yelverton, the 
Attorney- General, called for execution on the con- 
viction of 1603; and observed *the prisoner hath 
been a star at which the world hath gazed, but stars 
may fall, nay, they must fall when they trouble the 
sphere wherein they abide.' Chief Justice Mon- 
tague also improved the occasion with a rhetorical 
lecture, and then asked the prisoner if he had any- 
thing to set forth why sentence should not be passed. 
He tried to defend the Guiana expedition, but was 
instantly cut short and told he was not speaking to 
the purpose. 

'All I can say then,' answered Raleigh, *is that 
the judgement I received to die so long since cannot 
now I hope be strained, for since then it was His 
Majesty's pleasure to grant me a commission to 
proceed on a voyage beyond the seas, wherein I had 
martial power on the life and death of others, so 
under favour, I presume I stand discharged of that 
judgement, by that commission I gained new life 
and vigour; for he that hath power over the lives of 
others must surely be master of his own.' 

*The commission does not infer pardon,' was 
the judge's reply, 'because treason is a crime which 
must be pardoned by express words not by 
implication.' 

182 



The End 

If that were his Lordship's opinion, said Raleigh, 
he could do nothing but put himself upon the mercy 
of the King. Had not His Majesty been exasperated 
anew against him he might have lived a thousand 
years before he would have taken advantage of that 
conviction. He begged for time to settle his affairs, 
and for pen, ink and papers, as he wished to relieve 
his conscience by making a statement in writing to 
satisfy the King. His last shred of hope had been 
based on the idea that the commission had been as 
good as a pardon, now that hope was gone he resigned 
himself to fate with perfect calmness and dignity. 
He even had a 'smiling countenance' as he was led 
from William Rufus's noble hall to the little prison 
in the Gatehouse of Westminster, where he was to 
spend his last hours. The craven King, who had 
shamefully doomed the most distinguished of his 
subjects to suffer death to please a foreign power, 
kept out of London at one of his country seats. No 
doubt he indulged in his favourite pastime of gallop- 
ing heavily after the hounds in pursuit of a stag 
while the block was being prepared in Palace Yard 
for the sacrifice of his human victim. 

Here the last chapter of Raleigh's tragic history 
was to be closed in the morning of Lord Mayor's 
Day, the holiday being chosen, as it was hoped that 
scenes of festivity would attract the crowds in other 
directions and prevent a popular demonstration at 
Westminster. Everything that was best and finest 
in Raleigh's character shone out brilliantly at the 
end. No more did he cringe and write abject 
letters beseeching a base King to spare his life. 
Though he had loved and clung to life, he did not 

183 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

shrink from death now it stared him in the face; 
that Death which he had apostrophized so grandly 
in the following famous passage: *0h eloquent 
just and mighty death, whom none could advise 
thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared thou 
hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered 
thou hast cast out of the world and despised; thou 
hast drawn together all the far stretched greatness, all 
the pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered 
it all over with these two narrow words *'ffic jacet, " ' 
It was during that last night in the Gatehouse 
prison that he wrote on the fly-leaf of his Bible: 

Even such is Time, that takes on trust 
Our youth, our joys, our all we have. 
And pays us but with earth and dust; 
Who, in the dark and silent grave. 
When we have wandered all our ways. 
Shuts up the story of our days: 
But from this earth, this grave, this dust 
My God shall raise me up, I trust. 

Who that reads these last two lines can doubt that 
Raleigh, the man who had been charged so lightly 
with atheism,^ looked forward with steadfast faith 

^The Captain who gave such instructions as the following was 
no atheist: 'Orders to be observed by the commanders of the Fleet 
and Land Companies under the Charge and Conduct of Sir Walter 
Raleigh Knight, bound for the South Parts of America — given at 
Plymouth in Devon May 3rd 1617. 

'First, because no action or enterprise can prosper without the 
favour of Almighty God the Lord and Strength of hosts and armies ye 
shall not fail to cause divine service to be read in your ship every morn- 
ing and evening, in the morning before dinner and at night before sup- 
per, or, at least once in the day praising God every night with singing 
of psalms at the setting of the watch. Secondly, you shall take special 
care that God be not blasphemed in your ship/ and so on. 

184 



The End 

to the Resurrection as he was drawing near the 
Valley of the Shadow through which all have to 
pass ? 

It may have been reaction and relief after the 
prolonged tension of hoping against hope which 
gave Raleigh courage to assume the gay air of 
gallantry with which he met his end and won the 
admiration of all times. As he came from West- 
minster Hall to the Gatehouse, sentenced to die on 
the morrow, he met an old acquaintance with a 
cheerful greeting, and 'You will come to-morrow 
morning,' as if inviting him to the drama in which 
he was to play the title role. *I do not know what 
you may do for a place. For my part I am sure of 
one. You must seek what shrift you can.' 

His kinsman, Thomas Flynn, who visited him at 
the Gatehouse, rebuked him for being too merry. 
*It is my last mirth in this world,' he replied, *do 
not grudge it to me. When I come to the sad part- 
ing you will see me grave enough,' was his answer. 
The Dean of Westminster, Tounson, came to offer 
him spiritual consolation, and was struck too by his 
demeanour of cheeriness so near death. * He seemed 
to make so light of it that I wondered at him. But 
he gave God thanks that he never feared death. He 
was the most fearless of death that ever was known, 
and the most resolute and confident, yet with 
reverence and conscience.' 

Deeply pathetic must have been the * sad parting ' 
that night from the beloved one to whom through all 
vicissitudes he had been a true and tender husband. 
Lady Raleigh, broken-hearted, came at dusk to take 
farewell of him, and they conversed together for 

185 



Sir Weaker Raleigh 

several hours. She had up till the last prostrated 
herself in prayers that he might be saved, and her 
boy had appealed with passionate vehemence to the 
King for his father's life. No wonder that after- 
ward, when the Earl of Pembroke brought young 
Carew Raleigh to court, James * liked not his 
countenance' and said he appeared to him like 
the ghost of his father. Of the boy, his poor 
parents at their anguished parting had not courage 
to speak. They confined themselves to talking of 
Raleigh's future vindication in case he should not 
be allowed to defend himself at the block. In a 
burst of grief Lady Raleigh told her husband of the 
one miserable concession that all her petitions had 
succeeded in wringing from the Lords of the Council. 
They would not grant her his life, but had permitted 
her the right of claiming his body after death. And 
as the hour of midnight boomed from the clock of 
the abbey, and she had to wrench herself from his 
arms, he said gently: 

*It is well, dear Bess, that thou may est dispose of 
that dead which thou hadst not always the disposing 
of when alive.' 

After she was gone he spent the hours that re- 
mained in reading, writing and musing. Dean 
Tounson, who attended him to the end, wrote to a 
friend: 'He was very cheerful that morning he died; 
eate his breakfast heartily and took tobacco; and 
made no more of his death than it had been to take a 
j ourney ; and left a great impression on the minds of 
those that beheld him . . .' On his leaving the 
Gatehouse some one handed him a cup of wine, and 
when asked if it was to his liking, he said, *I will 

186 



The End 

answer you as did the fellow who drank at St 
Giles's bowl as he went to Tyburn, "It is a good 
drink if a man might but tarry by it.'" 

He received the Holy Communion early, and was 
led forth to the block in Palace Yard, wearing a 
black velvet night-gown over a hair-coloured waist- 
coat, black cut taffetas breeches, and ash-coloured 
stockings. Under his hat he wore a 'wrought lace 
night-cap,' which he threw to a bald-headed old man 
in the crowd, saying that his need of it was greater 
than his own. He was surrounded by sixty guards. 
The morning was cold and frosty, and some work- 
men, who had made furnaces beneath the scaffold, 
asked him to come down and warm himself by 
them. 

There was no reason to have feared that the right 
of free speech would be refused him. He spoke for 
three-quarters of an hour, people of all sorts and 
degrees hanging on his lips. In spite of its being 
Lord Mayor's Day, the crowd was enormous. His 
stately bearing and simple dignity profoundly moved 
the spectators. 

*I thank God that he has sent me to die in the 
light and not in the darkness' was his first ex- 
clamation, for he had greatly feared that he would be 
put an end to secretly and so prevented from utter- 
ing his vindication in public. Then he apologized 
for the weakness of his voice owing to his ague, and 
was afraid he would not be heard by the members of 
the Council who sat in the window near; and the 
Earls of Arundel, Oxford and Northampton answered 
that they would come down to him, and accordingly 
did so, and stood by him while he spoke. With 

187 



Sir TValter Raleigh 

splendid soul-stirring eloquence and great solemnity 
he once more related his story, replying one by one to 
the charges brought against him. He called God to 
witness that he was a true Englishman, who had not 
held treaty with the French, that he had not re- 
joiced ungenerously over the death of Essex and 
smoked a pipe of tobacco during his execution, that 
his conduct with regard to the last exploration of 
Guiana had been straightforward and sincere. In- 
dignantly he exposed the lies of Stukeley (whom 
nevertheless he forgave) and of the quack Manourie. 
He craved God's pardon for his sins, saying: 

'I have grievously offended, being a man full of all 
vanity who has lived a sinful life in such callings as 
are most conducive to it. For I have been a soldier, 
sailor and courtier which are courses of wickedness 
and vice.' Then he put off his long velvet gown and 
satin doublet and made ready, calmly and cheerfully 
for the end. *I have a long journey to go,' he said, 
* therefore I must take leave.' The executioner, 
kneeling, begged his forgiveness, and he freely 
granted it, laying his hands on the man's shoulders. 
Next he asked him to show him the axe. * Pry thee 
let me see it. Dost thou think I am afraid of \tT 
And after testing the blade with his fingers, he said 
to the sheriff, 'This is a sharp and fair medicine, but 
a sound cure for all diseases.' To the question which 
way he would lie upon the block, he replied, ' So the 
heart be right, it little matters which way the head 
lies.' 

When the headsman should have dealt the fatal 
stroke, he hesitated, though Raleigh had twice given 
the signal. Then for the last time the soft per- 

188 



The End 

suaslve voice was heard admonishing, 'What dost 
thou fear? Strike, man! strike!' 

And the blow fell which severed the grand grey- 
head of Walter Raleigh from his wracked and ague- 
stricken body, to the eternal shame of the monarch. 
A groan of indignation and disgust rose from the 
crowd as the head was thrust into a red bag, a 
groan that was echoed as the news spread throughout 
the land. The fearlessness and nobility of his death 
bestowed on Raleigh that never-ending popularity 
among his countrymen which in the pride and inso- 
lence of his prosperous days he had never been able 
to attain. Englishmen execrated more than ever 
the proposed Spanish alliance, and James himself 
soon began to see the futility of having put to death 
' a man who was able to have done him service, as 
useful a man as served any prince in Christendom.' 
Such was the belated praise which he gave Raleigh in 
his reproaches to Spain when it was plain to all the 
world that Spain had outwitted him and had lowered 
the prestige of England. 

The day after her husband's execution Lady 
Raleigh wrote a pathetic note to her brother, asking 
him to be allowed *to berri the worthy boddi of my 
nobell hosban, Sur Walter Raleigh in your Chorche 
atBeddington. . . .God hold me in my wits.' Why, 
after this request, the body was buried in the chan- 
cel of St Margaret's, Westminster, no one knows. 
His faithful widow preserved and cherished the head 
all the years that she survived him, and then be- 
queathed it to their son Carew, in whose grave it was 
buried. In the next reign this son vainly petitioned 
Charles I for the restoration of the Sherborne 

189 



Sir Walter Raleigh 

estates, and, referring to his father's execution, said 
that * Justice was indeed bhnd . . . condemning for 
things contradictory, for Sir Walter Raleigh was con- 
demned for being a friend to the Spaniards and lost 
his life for being their utter enemy.' 

Borrowing the phrase 'things contradictory* 
from Raleigh's son, we may apply it, in a different 
sense from which he used it, to his father's character. 
The polished courtier, seaman, soldier, poet and 
Virginian planter was a nature compounded indeed 
of many varying elements. We have seen, in 
following his history, how capable he was of the 
highest and noblest actions, and how often he de- 
scended to the lowest and most ignoble. He was not 
born too soon or too late. As Mr Hume says, 
Raleigh was ' a child of his age,' the spacious age of 
Elizabeth, when England was a ' nest of singing birds' 
teeming with the spirit of the Renaissance and crav- 
ing for adventure and gold. Raleigh's faults were 
the faults of his time, yet, even allowing this, it is 
difficult to reconcile the man of high principle with 
the man who repudiated the rumour of his marriage 
to the charming maid-of-honour when she was al- 
ready his wife, or the brave man who scorned danger 
and death, with the grovelling pleader for mercy at 
the hands of a boorish King. Hard, too, is it to 
understand how the high-minded head of the Sher- 
borne household, the tender and affectionate hus- 
band and kindly father, could pen anything so cold 
and selfish and full of worldly cynicism as * Instruc- 
tions to his Son and Posterity,' which rival Lord 
Chesterfield's of a later date. Harder of all to be- 
lieve that the author of the SouVs Errand, palpitat- 

190 



The End 

ing as it does with lofty sentiment and scorn of evil- 
doers in high places, could flatter so shamelessly and 
pander so grossly to the absurd vanity of his 
Queen. 

Yet when all is said and done, let us never forget 
that Raleigh's ambition was not all for self, but for 
the nation's good. He was not only the reckless 
gambler, but the patriot and idealist, the first to 
dream of planting that vast empire beyond the seas 
which to-day is Britain's chief boast and glory. For 
the sake of this ideal he became the 'scourge of 
Spain,' for this he lived and died, and as Raleigh's 
eventful career, with its dazzling opening and its 
tragic end, passes again in review before our eyes, 
like pictures from the romance of some knight- 
errant, we think of the words Shakespeare said of 
another; he 

Had the elements 

So mixed in him that Nature might stand up 

And say to all the world, *This was a man/ 



191 



BOOKS CONSULTED 

Life of Sir Walter Raleigh: with his History of the 

World. William Oldys. 1733. 
Sir Walter Raleigh: a Biography. William Stebbing. 
The Works of Sir Walter Raleigh: with Letters and 

Poems. Thomas Birch. 
The Life of Sir Walter Raleigh. Arthur Caylcy. 
Life and Letters. 2 vols. Edward Edwards. 
Raleigh. Edmund Gosse. (Men of Action Series). 

Macmillan. 
Aubrey's Lives of Eminent Men. 
Sir Walter Raleigh. J. A. Taylor. (Methuen's Little 

Biographies.) 
Sir Walter Raleigh. Major Martin Hume. 
Spenser. Dean Church. (Men of Letters). 
Great Seamen of the Sixteenth Century. Sidney Lee. 



